Last month’s UCLA-Leonardo Art|Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) included a fabulous lightning talk from Seri Robinson, a professor of wood anatomy at Oregon State University and a wood artist. She works with wood colored by fungal pigments, exploring the interactions between different species as they grow and bump in to each other to leave behind beautiful [...]

The language of innovation often stresses disruption–eliminating inefficient industries and replacing them with more streamlined, technologically advanced versions. Nowhere is disruption more complex and important than in the energy industry, with implications for so much of the way that we live, affecting global industry, economics, and climate. A major focus of synthetic biology today is [...]

Megan Daalder‘s Project Eureka is a shape-shifting and multidimensional narrative about life, science, and technology after the end of the world. At her work-in-progress exhibition at the UCLA Art|Science gallery, which opened this week, she invites us to visit Eureka’s future, set in the year 2050. In this future “the ‘Naturals’ have won,” and society [...]

This post originally appeared on the brand new Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Synberc) Blog. Check it out for other new posts by Jay Keasling and Linda Kahl on intellectual property law and synthetic biology. —————— Synthetic biology is often referred to as “the field of the future,” the foundation of a third industrial revolution” [...]

I’m fascinated by the biology of soil and the history of “dirtiness”–where dirt and bacteria are allowed to be and where we must clean them away. Mary Douglas defines dirt in her classic book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo as “matter out of place”: [Dirt] is a relative idea. [...]

There’s been a lot of interesting papers out this month in synthetic biology. Here’s a quick roundup of some news and research: Oliver Wright, Guy-Bart Stan and Tom Ellis. Building-in Biosafety for Synthetic Biology. Microbiology, March 2013. Preprint PDF available here. Christine Rabinovitch-Deer, John Oliver, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Shota Atsumi. Synthetic BIology and Metabolic Engineering [...]

Darwin’s sketch of an evolutionary tree under the heading “I think” is a powerful and enduring image of his theory evolution by natural selection. Phylogenetic trees–branching diagrams that show the relationships between organisms and their evolution from a common ancestor–are now a standard image in biology texts used to situate an organism in biological space [...]

Art and science address the question of what makes us who we are in different, difficult, often contradictory ways. Since the phrase “nature and nurture” was first used in the late 19th century, trying to separate the contributions of inborn heredity and external environment to our unique individuality, there have been people who argue for [...]

Wonder and amazement at the natural world inspire many blog posts, projects, and even careers in science, but it’s rare that you’ll see wonder break through the soul-crushing passive voice of the scientific literature. It wasn’t always this way, of course. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, historians of science Lorraine Daston and [...]

I take a lot of photos of bacteria on my phone, and sometimes I use those pictures as my phone’s wallpaper. These photos are meta-phone bacteria wallpapers: photographs of bacteria that I collected off the surface of my phone (h/t to Nick for the microbial inspiration). To sample the phone’s microbiome I simply placed it [...]