Oscillator
Latest / page 3
Everyone’s talking about it
Posted by Christina Agapakis on January 30, 2011 All the science blogs are talking about it. Where are all the female science bloggers? The question itself and the long lists of great bloggers who happen to be female bring up a lot of interesting questions about what makes a good blog, what is best for blog (self-)promotion, who is in what science blogging…
Qwiki Science
Posted by Christina Agapakis on January 26, 2011 I’ve been playing a bit with the alpha of Qwiki, a new website that offers users an innovative “information experience.” The site collects images, videos, and text about topics from the internet and then displays the images future-aesthetically while reading the information in a delightful robot voice. There are still some kinks to work out,…
Food for Thought
Posted by Christina Agapakis on January 23, 2011 Industrial food production separates us from our food, increasing the distance from living thing to food product. As factories continue to import corn and export almost everything we eat, writers like Michael Pollan urge us to eat “real” food, and projects like the Slow Food movement have gained over 100,000 members who strive to preserve…
Synthetic Biology Documentary
Posted by Christina Agapakis on January 20, 2011 What do you get when you combine two of my favorite things, synthetic biology and documentary film? We may never know if Sam and George don’t get the funding they need on Kickstarter! I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but I met these guys while they were filming in Boston and their movie…
Experimental Livestream
Posted by Christina Agapakis on January 19, 2011 My friend Patrick is embarking on a 48 experiment, studying circadian rhythm and destroying his own in the process. He’s also embarking on a social media experiment, live-streaming the whole thing on ustream. Tune in to watch real science in action and the effects of sleep deprivation on scientists! You can even ask him questions…
Truth Stranger Than Fiction
Posted by Christina Agapakis on January 16, 2011 Yesterday I mentioned Symbiotic Households, an art project imagining genetically engineered mosquitoes that provide mood stabilizing compounds to a population plagued by worries caused by climate change. Today on twitter I saw a link to a US patent application filed by Microsoft about engineering parasites to monitor and maintain human health. The possible engineered parasites…
The Symbiotic Household
Posted by Christina Agapakis on January 15, 2011 With The Symbiotic Household, Elliott P. Montgomery seeks to find answers to problems caused by climate change. Low-cost, low energy solutions are proposed through complex genetic engineering of domesticated insects–”What better way to deal with a future need than with a future technology?” The project is deliberatively provocative; “By offering a problematic answer, I want…
Making blind mice see
Posted by Christina Agapakis on December 8, 2010 Evolution connects all living things on earth, from the arsenic tolerant bacteria in the news this week to the human scientists and bloggers chatting about it. Eyes are intricately complex structures made up of many many cells, but even single-celled microbes can sense and respond to light through the function of proteins that share evolutionary…
Stop Motion History of Life
Posted by Christina Agapakis on December 7, 2010 An incredible (if unscientific) look at the history of life: The video has been around for a few months and has a gajillion hits so sorry if I’m late to the party, I just had to share! By Blu, via Bio Fiction
Dispatches from the Future
Posted by Christina Agapakis on November 26, 2010 It’s been a few weeks since the iGEM jamboree, a whirlwind, completely exhausting weekend of student synthetic biology projects. This tweet from Robin Sloan from the #igem2010 stream is a pretty good way to sum up the weekend: Tweets tagged #igem2010 right now read like dispatches from the future. (It’s the big student synthetic biology…