Now on ScienceBlogs: Oldest Human-Made Object in Space
Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
Category: bioenergy
I had a great conversation with Maggie Koerth-Baker from BoingBoing for bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday. We talked about all sorts of sciency stuff, including her upcoming book on the challenges of renewable energy, synthetic biology, the similarities between cheese and the...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:16 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: art
The Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative Graduate Consortium hosted a fun workshop during the January term where students learned about microscopy by taking some amazing pictures of food microbes. The images taken with the scanning electron microscope of sauerkraut, kombucha, and...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 4:16 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: art
A growing number of young contemporary artists also explore the distance between us and what we eat by bringing secretions of the human body into food production.
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 5:59 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: design
There's a neat article in the Guardian today about designing new foods with genetic engineering and biotechnology. Food, science, and design are intertwined from how we grow our food to how we eat it, from microwavable dinners to three-star molecular...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 2:31 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
Thanks to some informative comments on my post about figs and wikipedia my knowledge of botany is slowly improving and my admiration of figs steadily increasing. Many species of figs are pollinated by symbiotic wasps, but there are other fig...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 2:01 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: symbiosis
A delightful lunch conversation about fruits introduced me to what may be my new favorite symbiotic relationship! Figs are not actually fruits but a mass of inverted flowers and seeds that are pollinated by a species of tiny symbiotic wasps....
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 1:27 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food
Science is cooking done in a lab. Mixing carefully (or not so carefully) measured components, heating, cooling, observing phase transitions, exploring the behavior of animal and plant proteins, exploring the properties of different chemicals, slowly changing variables to optimizing procedures....
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 1:02 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: iGEM
The first (and sometimes 3rd, 12th, 25th, 134th...) step of any genetic engineering experiment is often extracting DNA from some organism or another. While novel gene synthesis technology will likely make this procedure obsolete, these days it's still most economical...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 5:15 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: iGEM
iGEM officially starts for the Harvard team tomorrow for some good old-fashioned fun with BioBricks, arabidopsis, protein-based sweeteners, and shRNA! Our goal is to make a system for genetically engineering plants safely and easily with some hopefully fun and useful...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 4:12 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: plants
What is a true food allergy, and what can be done to fix them besides banning peanuts from schools and avoiding foods that make us itchy?
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:28 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Orac 02.14.2012
Tim Lambert 02.01.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
Orac 01.26.2012
Steinn Sigurðsson 02.14.2012
