Today is International Fascination of Plants Day, so I wanted to share some plant science that I have recently been fascinated by. I’ve become a bit obsessed with research on growing plants in space, how plants respond to microgravity, and the potential for space agriculture. Plant research in space focuses on growing plants for long-term [...]

Plants don’t always seem particularly charismatic, but hidden from us in their slow-motion and chemical activities are incredible mechanisms that sense and respond to the world around them. Plants move in response to light, bending and stretching to get maximum sunlight. This phototropism extends all the way down to much smaller photosynthetic organisms. Like other [...]

Genomes are complicated. Even the concept of a “gene” isn’t as straightforward as you might expect. Genes are the units of heredity, the bits of DNA and RNA that do something inside a cell. But DNA doesn’t do much of anything by itself; genes need proteins to copy themselves and to turn the small percentage [...]

A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing [...]

My trip to Austin last week provided a great opportunity to collect bacteria. I’ve been interested in the microbiome for a while, and since my Synthetic Aesthetics residency in 2010 I’ve been especially interested in the bacteria on skin and in cheese. The continuation of the project is up online now at bacterially.org, where we’re [...]

An interesting twitter conversation got me thinking about how to “photograph” smells. So much of our experience and our exchange of information is visual, but smell resists visualization. Unlike the cartoons, we don’t have smell-o-vision and we don’t have stink lines and clouds of green smoke around smelly things. How can we turn smells into [...]

This year will be my first time going to SXSW Interactive and I’m super excited. Here are a few of the science/tech/art panels that I’ll be going to. March 10: Rethinking How to Communicate Science “Communicating about science requires balancing competing interests with conflicting evidence. The craft of science communication will evolve with new technology [...]

“In biology, magnetism is a unique and virtually orthogonal physical property.” Only a few organisms can actively sense and utilize magnetic fields. Magnetotactic bacteria contain strings of iron-dense membrane-bound organelles filled with magnetic crystals called magnetosomes, which act like microscopic compasses. Bacteria that contain magnetosomes can detect the earth’s magnetic field, telling them which direction [...]

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) [...]