Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology.
Over the holidays, my love for competition overtook my dislike of being constantly monitored, so I got a fitbit. The small device tracks the number of steps I've taken and the number of floors I've climbed, syncing to a server that ranks me against friends and family...
You may have seen the recent news of a sensor-filled smartfork that vibrates to warn you if you're eating too quickly. I'm going to reserve judgement on the merits of the smartfork, invented by the French company Slow Control and marketed by HAPILABS, but I think it's interesting to look at this cutlery innovation in the context of fork history, from its origins in Ancient Egypt to the two-in-one spork and beyond...
Cheese is carefully rotted milk, an ancient domestication of microbial activities for human consumption. Humans work in concert with communities of bacteria and fungi to produce the hundreds of different kinds of cheeses, flavored by the metabolic excretions of microbes eating the sugars, proteins, and fats in the milk...
I got a really fun early Christmas gift yesterday, Moyasimon 1: Tales of Agriculture , a manga series about a boy who can see microbes. His skills lead to some exciting fermentation-related adventures at his agriculture college...
I have a piece with Sissel Tolaas in the new issue of Current Opinion in Chemical Biology on aesthetics in science. The issue, edited by the artist and designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, includes reviews by scientists, philosophers, and artists discussing the role of aesthetic and senory judgements in the everyday practice of science, the theory and representation of scientific facts, and in the design of living technologies.Many scientists and philosophers have discussed the role of beauty in science, in particular when judging competing theories in physics...
White is a mixture, made by a combination of signals at equal intensity across a perceptual space. White light can be split up into all the colors of the visible spectrum, and white noise covers a range of frequencies within the audible range.Our other senses don't have as clearly defined ranges of perception...
Before there was sound in movies there was smell. In 1906, a Pennsylvania movie theater soaked a wad of cotton wool in rose oil and placed it in front of a fan.
Using the words evolution and design in the same paragraph, let alone together in the title of a blog post, can make biologists very uncomfortable. Design is something that humans do on purpose, and natural selection doesn't "do" anything on purpose...
Smell is notoriously subjective and hard to define. Odors can be perceived differently by different people depending on genetics, culture, past experience, the environment, and whether they've had a really bad sinus infection or not...
I recently saw an image that perfectly encapsulates many of my current interests, including odor and flavor mapping, the senses in scientific analysis, medieval ideas about health and disease, body fluids, and metabolic profiling...
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