cagapakis
Posts by this author
November 13, 2010
Everything has a unique chemical signature. Every body, every place. When you smell home you're sensing all the chemical traces that make up the place you grew up. When you smell your mate, you're smelling the unique combination of their body and the microbiome of their skin.
The unique smell of…
October 24, 2010
Nick pointed me to a fabulous podcast series by CBC radio called "How To Think About Science." Each episode is a long and fascinating interview with a prominent scholar of science--scientists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians who explore how science is done, how…
October 20, 2010
We can babble philosophically about whether or not what we call "red" looks the same from another person's eyes, we can compare the adjectives we use to specify colors--is it maraschino red or cayenne?--but when we're talking to our computers, categorizing flowers, designing objects for mass…
October 13, 2010
Mammalian cells need something to hold on to before they can stick to each other and form tissues. The plastic dishes that cells grow on in the lab need to be first coated with special chemicals that grab the cells and convince them to stick. Once the first batch of cells is down they start forming…
October 12, 2010
It's not just Scott Kern who thinks that science is only about tedious benchwork and that grad students should be boring robots moving small volumes of liquid around 20 hours a day for the greater good. An unscientific analysis of the 169 comments and numerous comment thumbs ups of Hydrocalypse…
October 7, 2010
iGEM students are nothing if not creative, fun, and super nerdy. Here is a taste of some of the awesome videos being made by this year's crop, enjoy!
Cambridge, with a catchy song about new techniques for joining pieces of DNA together:
(via LabRat)
Hong Kong University's Inception trailer:
TU…
September 30, 2010
There was some big news yesterday in transgenic silk from Notre Dame and the University of Wyoming, where scientists have genetically engineered silkworms to produce silk that is a mixture of spider silk and the regular silkworm stuff. Silkworms produce the strong and versatile silk that is used to…
September 26, 2010
So I was browsing the internet for info on G-protein coupled receptors and ended up finding some interesting facts about sperm. It turns out sperm don't just swim blindly, hoping to randomly bump into eggs. Instead, like bacteria, sperm can sense their chemical environment and adjust their swimming…
September 22, 2010
Thanks to the internet, you can find out your pirate name and your Jersey Shore name, and now thanks to the EMBL-EBI learning tools, you can find your protein name too!
When you type your name into the box, the program reads the letters of your name as if they were the single-letter codes for amino…
September 16, 2010
Our friends at Ginkgo BioWorks are hiring and they asked Hydrocalypse Industries to make them a video! Who Is the Bioengineer of the Future?
It could be you!
September 15, 2010
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 gastronomy at El Bulli. Designers like Oron…
September 14, 2010
This year's Cambridge iGEM team has made a tiny, wireless lightbulb filled with bioluminescent bacteria! There are two main ways of engineering luminescence in E. coli (I assume these are E. coli, correct me if I'm wrong!). One is to express the luciferase gene from fireflies, which adds ATP and…
September 13, 2010
The new season of Science in the News starts next week with a great schedule of science lectures by Harvard grad students free and open to the public. If you're in the Boston area, definitely check it out!
Here's the schedule:
September 22: Evidence-based Medicine: A Case Study of Vaccines and…
September 13, 2010
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 varieties that develop edible, seedless figs through a…
September 11, 2010
My good friend and labmate just published an awesome paper: "Emergent cooperation in microbial metabolism." His experiment started with 46 strains of E. coli that had mutations in their metabolic pathways that prevented them from being able to grow without supplementing the media with extra…
September 10, 2010
Noise obscures meaningful information. Noise is what ruins your carefully designed synthetic biology gene circuit. But noise is part of life and life, it turns out, needs noise. There's a terrific review article in this week's Nature discussing recent theoretical and experimental work on…
September 8, 2010
Cells are constantly jibber jabbering, sending messages to each other to coordinate behavior, both within a population of single-celled organisms or between cells of an individual multicellular organism. Most of these signals are chemicals that float around in the liquid that surrounds the cells…
September 7, 2010
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. The male fig flower is the only place where the female…
September 6, 2010
A lot of synthetic biology is about getting biology to be more like electrical engineering, designing genetic "logic gates" to create a living circuit board. Beyond analogies, however, cells have many fascinating electrical properties--proteins that transfer electrons like wires, membranes that…
September 4, 2010
Life transforms environments, creating ecosystems where there was once only rocks. The evolution of photosynthetic bacteria billions of years ago created the atmosphere we have today, paving the way for the evolution of larger, oxygen-breathing organisms. We humans obviously transform our…
September 3, 2010
Check out this awesome video of a computer-controlled swarm of magnetic bacteria building a pyramid out of tiny bricks!!!
From IEEE Spectrum, via It Takes 30, the always fascinating blog from Harvard Systems Biology, the department my lab is in!
August 30, 2010
Sometimes among all of the tedious protocols and mundane inconclusive data, I forget that I'm doing something amazing and incredibly powerful. Almost all my experiments require altering a living organism to do my bidding--to hold onto and replicate a piece of DNA that I'm interested in or to…
August 25, 2010
There's a terrific new article in New Scientist about some of the ways scientists are working on turning pee into energy. There's a lot of pee in the world all going to waste, often at huge cost to the environment in terms of energy used to collect and purify waste water. Methods that can produce…
August 18, 2010
A recent survey of 3,000 people worldwide found what many have known all along--that Legos are the best toy ever made. For synthetic biologists, this doesn't come as much of a surprise--Legos are at the heart of the concepts underlying the basics of synthetic biology.
Legos are a favorite analogy…
August 10, 2010
It turns out that my wonderful iGEM students, besides being brilliant scientists, are also excellent, hilarious actors. Please enjoy their Jersey Shore inspired video about molecular cloning:
August 4, 2010
My Synthetic Aesthetics partner, Sissel Tolaas, is featured in the terrific current issue of the German interview magazine mono.kultur. Her work focuses on smell, exploring the unique smellscapes of different cities, creating provocative scents to show in art galleries, branded "logo" scents for…
July 30, 2010
I have a very weak constitution. It doesn't take much time on a moving vehicle of any type to make be barf, and I've hurled all over gorgeous coastal areas in tourist destinations around the world. There was that one time in Italy, snapping photos of the incredible shoreline caves (now dubbed barf…
July 22, 2010
GOOD has an interesting series of articles called No More Dirty Looks about the cosmetics that we use every day and what options are available for safer, more environmentally sound beauty products, without any toxic carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, or petrochemicals. Yesterday they linked to a…
July 20, 2010
Everyone's favorite Slovenian philsopher, Slavoj Žižek, discussing his provocative perspective on nature, ecology, biotechnology, and climate change while dumpster diving:
via Immanent Discursivity (thanks Nick!)
July 19, 2010
I recently found this fascinating (relatively) old review article (open access) by awesome MIT professor Natalie Kuldell about teaching synthetic biology. Synthetic biology has integrated teaching and learning with the development of the field since basically the beginning of the field, with…