An awesome paper from Shawn Douglas, Ido Bachelet, and George Church at the Wyss Institute uses DNA origami to create nanorobots that can target and kill cancer cells in a population of healthy cells. Check out the video where the authors describe their work, or stories from Nature News and New Scientist. Douglas, S. M., [...]

Tuur van Balen gives a provocative how-to presentation at the Next Nature Power Show, showing how to use the Synthetic Biology Parts Registry to engineer yogurt bacteria to produce prozac: Van Balen is a designer whose work explores the boundary between art and science in synthetic biology. From his website: Tuur Van Balen (Belgium, 1981) [...]

I recently saw a really fun talk by Amisha Gadani, an artist in residence here at UCLA in the Alfaro Lab. Her recent work is a playful exploration of animal self-defense mechanisms incorporated into fashionable cocktail dresses. The Blowfish Dress inflates when she’s startled, creating a bright and threatening silhouette that can intimidate an attacker: [...]

One of my new obsessions is bacterial multicellularity. Single celled micro-organisms are constantly interacting with their neighbors, from individuals of the same species to cells from different domains of life, forming complex biofilm patterns, complex nutritional symbioses, and complex clumps. Clumps and granules consisting of multiple different species form spontaneously in many interesting environments. In [...]

Feet smell like feet and armpits smell like armpits because they each harbor unique species of bacteria with unique metabolisms that produce unique volatiles. Human skin is covered in a patchwork of many different microbes and microbial communities, collectively known as the microbiome, a layer of our bodies that is still very poorly understood. Research [...]

Bacteria grow by dividing in half, their population doubling in size as fast as every twenty minutes. In a few short hours, a bacterial culture can go from a single cell to billions, and from being invisible to the naked eye to forming dense colonies on a petri dish, sometimes centimeters across. These colonies can [...]

I’m haunted by one of the stories in the latest episode of Radiolab, can’t get it out of my head. Like everyone else, I love Radiolab and often sprinkle stories I learned from the show into cocktail party conversation (do I go to nerdy cocktail parties or do I make cocktail parties nerdy?), but the [...]

Over the holidays my husband has been experimenting with Japanese cooking, and as various broths simmered on the stove and our collection of soy-based pastes and sauces expanded, my love affair with MSG was rekindled. MSG (monosodium glutamate) is the sodium salt of glutamic acid, a naturally occurring amino acid that makes up proteins. Glutamic [...]

Nature is a slippery word. Nature is the opposite of culture but “natural” behaviors are culturally expected from us. Nature is serene and wholesome, but nature is red in tooth and claw. Nature is the opposite of technology, but any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Nature is wild and untouched by humans, but [...]

In some labs, biology and computer science are converging. On the one hand, computer scientists are working towards creating computer chips inspired by the circuitry of the brain, and on the other, some synthetic biologists are aiming to create biological computers inside living cells. Scientists and engineers have seen biology inside computers and computers inside [...]