cagapakis
Posts by this author
February 12, 2010
My labmate Bruno's newest paper, "A synthetic circuit for selectively arresting daughter cells to create aging populations" came out today in the journal Nucleic Acids Research (and it's open access!). Using a cleverly designed genetic circuit that activates cell growth arrest in newly divided…
February 11, 2010
BioShock2 came out a couple days ago, the sequel to the wildly successful video game BioShock. BioShock is a first-person-shooter video game set in Rapture, an underwater city overrun by violently insane genetically engineered mutants called "Splicers", creepy zombie-like girls, "Little Sisters",…
February 10, 2010
"The history of any given technology is extraordinarily complex."
--Rob Carlson, Biology is Technology.
Analyzing the history of a technology requires a complex look at the social, economic, and political context in which it emerged, and the reciprocal influences that…
February 8, 2010
Teachers' Domain, a digital media resource for teachers, profiled Karmella Haynes, one of my amazing labmates!
There's a fun video of Karmella talking about her work on synthetic biology devices to track cancer cells and about careers in science streaming on the Teachers' Domain website. You…
February 5, 2010
Synthetic biology is still a new field, and victories are small and incremental. Much of the promise and peril of synthetic biology still lies in the future: genetic devices made to order, computer aided genome design, organisms specially constructed for specific industrial purposes. Will we use…
February 3, 2010
I'm auditing a really cool class at MIT this semester called "Documenting Science Through Video and New Media." In the first class, we watched some of the earliest science films ever made, microscopic vaudeville performances by cheese mites and flies, made into a little meta-documentary by New…
February 2, 2010
I've had some great suggestions for "Official" State Microbes in comments and via twitter. I'm filling in the map as they come:
So far we have:
Alaska -- Alcanivorax borkumensis for its oil consumption
California -- Ralstonia metallidurans for its gold precipitating qualities (and CA-MRSA as a…
February 1, 2010
Wisconsin lawmakers just passed a bill to name Lactobacillus lactis, the bacteria that turns milk into cheese, into its official state microbe! What microbe do you think best represents your state? I think Massachusetts' state microbe should be E. coli, not for the gross make you sick part of…
January 29, 2010
The music from the Darwin Electro-Opera I mentioned a while back is now available for free, streaming on Pitchfork!
(via Nick)
January 28, 2010
Riversimple, a small UK-based company, has designed a tiny, relatively cheap, and remarkably open-source hydrogen fuel cell car. The car will not be available for sale, but people will be able to lease it, with the lease agreement including maintenance, fuel, and the eventual recycling of the car.…
January 27, 2010
I sort of love the "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" posters that have become the darling of interior decorating bloggers and graphic design jokesters alike in the past few years. I even have one of the posters hanging in my apartment. Then I saw Merlin's version.
At first I LOLed, and then I was like "huh…
January 26, 2010
Today in my searches for the hot new trends in synthetic biology, I found a news article from Science Daily with an intriguing title: "Scientists Achieve First Rewire of Genetic Switches." Rewiring genetic switches sounds pretty neat, but this headline was intriguing to me first of all because it's…
January 25, 2010
Check out these cute hand-embroidered oscilloscope merit badges! Available on Etsy.
January 25, 2010
There's a funny article over at H+ magazine called "Get Naked: It's Good for Your Brain," telling us exactly that:Clothing is crushing us! Trapped in tomb-like textiles, we exile our flesh from experiencing the environment. We atrophy the majority of our epidermis. If you put a plaster cast on a…
January 24, 2010
Things are gearing up for iGEM 2010, and in looking through some of the incredible work of the 2009 teams, I remembered the University of Washington Software team, who made an awesome lego robot that can move small volumes of liquid around in 96-well plates, a crucial and typically very expensive…
January 24, 2010
Cooperation and altruism are widespread in biology, from molecules and genes working together in a cell, to bacterial communities that require coordinated behavior to survive in a tough environment, to human relationships and societies. Our human cultural perspective (perhaps even more specifically…
January 21, 2010
Oscillators are huge in synthetic biology. They're an exciting challenge, very hard to make in a controlled, robust way, they have the potential to be useful in many applications, like well-timed drug delivery, and they can tell us a lot about how natural circadian rhythms work. A new paper in this…
January 20, 2010
Nature News has an excellent article about the hype, the challenges, and the potential of synthetic biology. The article quotes Martin Fussenegger, a leader in mammalian cell synthetic biology as saying "The field has had its hype phase, now it needs to deliver." In order to do so researchers will…
January 20, 2010
Modern day biological engineering and artificial life research focuses on the microscopic, the molecular, the informational, the stuff of the scientific revolutions of the past one hundred years. Our current synthetic biologies aim to turn the living into the designed, the wet into the…
January 18, 2010
Many synthetic biologists cite one of Richard Feynman's many famous quotations as the inspiration for their work: "What I cannot create I do not understand." For synthetic biology the interpretation is clear--only by designing and building living systems will we truly understand the principles…
January 17, 2010
Awful Library Books has a post on books about genetic engineering from the 1970's and 80's, saying that it's time to get rid of them because "Genetic information is dramatically different from what we knew in the 70's and 80's. No mention of Human Genome Project or Dolly, the sheep." If you're…
January 14, 2010
Most synthetic biologists and biological engineers (and basically everyone else) think of DNA as code, simply carrying the information to make the RNA and proteins that do the real work inside the cell. In the past few years, a small group of biological engineers have used DNA instead as a physical…
January 13, 2010
There have been a lot of great Darwin themed things popping up in the past few months in celebration of the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, but none as avant garde and awesome as "Tomorrow, in a year", an electro-opera based on the life and work of Charles Darwin by The Knife, a…
January 13, 2010
I just saw this neat blog post about Conway's Game of Life projected into three dimensions. You can download the script and play around with it yourself!
January 12, 2010
I am kind of obsessed with symbiosis and the idea that cooperation between different species can be a driver of evolutionary change. I learned about these symbiotic green sea slugs a while back from a colleague whose mom is a zoologist who studies the evolution of symbiosis between invertebrates…
January 11, 2010
My first exposure to programming was as a nerdy elementary schooler playing with Logo, a simple computer language written for educational use as a way to teach basic concepts in programming and computer science. The language controls the behavior of the "turtle," a triangular cursor in the middle…
January 11, 2010
I just finished reading Evelyn Fox Keller's wonderful biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism. Barbara McClintock was probably the best corn geneticist of all time and definitely one of the sassiest female scientists ever. In the 1940s and 1950s she discovered transposition, the…
January 8, 2010
What does it mean to create life in a computer? In 1970, John Conway built a simple computer game where a user decides which boxes in a grid are populated and then hits start, letting the computer "evolve" depending on the initial conditions. Each "cell" of the grid can be "alive" or "dead" and has…
January 7, 2010
My friend Devin's essay, "Making Cellular Memories" just came out today in Cell (and it's open access!) It's a great look at how natural cells and synthetic biological systems use feedback loops in order to maintain memory of past events. Like whole animals, cells need to remember what happened to…
January 6, 2010
Groups of individuals (from molecules to cells to animals) following simple rules and responding to environmental cues will create the amazingly complex emergent behaviors we see in nature, making cells, bodies, and societies far more than the sum of their parts. Each individual acts without…