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BlogsTags > biologyGlowing PlantsBy Mike LoukidesApril 26, 2013 I just invested in BioCurious’ Glowing Plants project on Kickstarter. I don’t watch Kickstarter closely, but this is about as fast as I’ve ever seen a project get funded. It went live on Wednesday; in the afternoon, I was backer … Data science in the natural sciencesBy Chris WigginsNovember 12, 2012 I find myself having conversations recently with people from increasingly diverse fields, both at Columbia and in local startups, about how their work is becoming “data-informed” or “data-driven,” and about the challenges posed by applied computational statistics or big data. … George Church and the potential of synthetic biologyBy Mike LoukidesNovember 9, 2012 A few weeks ago, I explained why I thought biohacking was one of the most important new trends in technology. If I didn’t convince you, Derek Jacoby’s review (below) of George Church’s new book, Regenesis, will. Church is no stranger … Biohacking: The next great wave of innovationBy Mike LoukidesOctober 3, 2012 I’ve been following synthetic biology for the past year or so, and we’re about to see some big changes. Synthetic bio seems to be now where the computer industry was in the late 1970s: still nascent, but about to explode. … Four short links: 19 March 2012
By Nat TorkingtonMarch 19, 2012 Examining His Own Body (Science Now) -- Stanford prof. has sequenced his DNA and is now getting massively Quantified Self on his metabolism, infections, etc. This caught my eye: George Church, who has pioneered DNA sequencing technology and runs the Personal Genome Project* at Harvard Medical School in Boston that enrolls people willing to share genomic and medical information... Four short links: 8 November 2011
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 8, 2011 Attempts to Make a Cell Operating System (Science Daily) -- finally we will be able to have the guaranteed quality of software and the safety of biological organisms. Why Kids Can't Search (Clive Thompson) -- kids need to be taught critical thinking skills about what they find on the web. Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re... Four short links: 8 November 2011
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 8, 2011 Attempts to Make a Cell Operating System (Science Daily) -- finally we will be able to have the guaranteed quality of software and the safety of biological organisms. Why Kids Can't Search (Clive Thompson) -- kids need to be taught critical thinking skills about what they find on the web. Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re... Four short links: 22 July 2011
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 22, 2011 Competitive Advantage Through Data -- the applications and business models for erecting barriers around proprietary data assets. Sees data businesses in these four categories: contributory data sourcing, offering cleaner data, data generated from service you offer, and viz/ux. The author does not yet appear to be considering when open or communal data is better than proprietary data, and how... OSCON Preview: Interview with Eri Gentry on a biologist's coffeehouseBy Andy OramJuly 21, 2011 BioCurious is a Silicon Valley gathering place for biologists and other people such as artists who are fascinated by biology. It serves for learning, sharing, and an incubator for products and ideas. OSCON Preview: Interview with Eri Gentry on a biologist's coffeehouse
By Andy OramJuly 21, 2011 BioCurious is a Silicon Valley gathering place for biologists and other people such as artists who are fascinated by biology. It serves for learning, sharing, and an incubator for products and ideas. Four short links: 24 May 2010
By Nat TorkingtonMay 24, 2010 Google Documents API -- permissions, revisions, search, export, upload, and file. Somehow I had missed that this existed. Profile of Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange (Sydney Morning Herald) -- he draws no salary, is constantly on the move, lived for a while in a compound in Nairobi with other NGOs, and cowrote the rubberhose filesystem which offers deniable encryption. OpenPCR... Four short links: 27 January 2010
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 27, 2010 Why I Am Disappointed with Nature Communications (Cameron Neylon) -- fascinating to learn what you can't do with "non-commercial"-licensed science research: using a paper for commercially funded research even within a university, using the content of paper to support a grant application, using the paper to judge a patent application, using a paper to assess the viability of a... Four short links: 23 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 22, 2009 Projections (YouTube) -- the incredible video projection onto an old English manor house by Kiwi Foo Camp alums The Dark Room. Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? (NYTimes) -- a thoughtful article about the possibilities and cautions of synthetic biology. . “A house pet is a domesticated parasite,” he noted. “ It is evolved to have an interaction with... Four short links: 5 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 4, 2009 Reboot Britain Video Archive -- video from the talks at Reboot Britain are online. The event also produced a essay set (PDF), CC-licensed. (via Paul Reynolds) Revealing Errors -- Benjamin Mako Hill blog using computer errors as starting points for understanding how computers control the world around us. (via Dan Meyer) New Microbe Strain Makes More Electricity, Faster --... Four short links: 28 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 27, 2009 CNMAT Resource Library -- The CNMAT Resource Library is our fast growing collection of materials, sensors, gestural controllers, interface devices, tools, demos, prototypes and products - all organized and annotated to support the design of physical interaction systems, "new lutherie" and art installations. (via egoodman on Delicious) PyGoWave Server -- first third-party Google Wave server, based on Django. Mobile... Four short links: 27 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 27, 2009 Ignite OSCON -- 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They're all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me. gheat -- a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends. CaDNAno -- open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church's projects. I love the combination... Four short links: 15 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 14, 2009 Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor (PNAS) -- We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas... Four short links: 9 June 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJune 9, 2009 Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio -- based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar. Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon -- While it’s significant that... Four short links: 12 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 12, 2009 Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you've stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap... Four short links: 5 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 4, 2009 Supermap -- The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is paying an undisclosed sum to California-based Geosemble Technologies to develop an intelligence version of the "geospatial data integration and layering technology" that the company developed for use by urban planners, real estate investors and market analysts. The technology combines overhead imagery, maps and heavy-duty data mining to create a map-based... Four short links: 4 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 4, 2009 Old Japanese Maps on Google Earth Unveil Secrets -- Google criticised for putting up map layers showing the towns where a discriminated-against class came from, because that class is still discriminated against and Google didn't put any "cultural context" around it. Google and their maps didn't make the underclass, Japanese society did. Because they're sensitive about having the problem,... Personal Genome Project Expanding the Personal Gene Pool from 10 to 100,000
By Timothy M. O'BrienApril 26, 2009 The Personal Gemone Project is evolving from a small pilot of ten to a massive collection of 100,000 public medical histories and DNA sequences. Find out how you can register to participate in an experiment that will lay the necessary foundation for a complete understanding of how one's genetic sequence affects health and disease. Four short links: 23 Apr 2009
By Nat TorkingtonApril 22, 2009 Multitouch, visualizations, body hacks, and ubicomp: Dell Demos Multitouch on the Studio One 19 (Engadget) -- the multitouch software on this baby is Fingertapps from the New Zealand company Unlimited Realities, whose founder was at Kiwi Foo Camp this year. Multitouch hits consumer PCs in a very mainstream way. Circos -- open source Perl library to produce beautiful circular data... Four short links: 8 Apr 2009
By Nat TorkingtonApril 8, 2009 Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware): Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a... ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos 
By James TurnerFebruary 17, 2009 If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She will be giving a talk entitled, "Real Hackers Program DNA" at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies Conference in March. And she's joining us here today. Thank you for taking the time. Four short links: 9 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 9, 2009 Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark? End Times - gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism. The... Richard Jefferson Interviewed in Com Ciência
By Nat TorkingtonDecember 24, 2008 I enjoyed this interview with Richard Jefferson (caution: PDF) from Com Ciência No. 102, October 05, 2008. Richard runs CAMBIA, a group that fights for open innovation in biological sciences. He's particularly cautionary about the potential for patents to greatly restrict the development of Synthetic Biology (SB): But don't doubt there will be some very interesting biological understanding that emerges... A New Science of Music: Digital Cantometrics and the Evolution of Music
By Timothy M. O'BrienOctober 10, 2008 Armand Leroi is an Evolutionary Biologist with the Imperial College in London. Leroi is leveraging the ability of computers to analyze sound to create a Cantometric description of traditional music from various cultures. Leroi discusses his research and his new initiative to create a digital Cantometric survey of traditional music. Auckland University Bioengineering Institute
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 11, 2008 I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology. I've... Improving Highschool Science Education
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 28, 2008 As I read this fascinating NYTimes piece on a Florida teacher covering evolution, I was reminded of an interesting email exchange I had recently with Kevin Padian, a UC Berkeley professor in the Dept of Integrative Biology, and curator of the UC Museum of Paleontology. He was at Science Foo Camp, and afterward wrote in email: My area is evolution,... Radar Theme: Personal Genomics
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 5, 2008 [This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends were currently tracking here at O'Reilly: 1, 2] Genetic analysis software and hardware used to be very expensive, only for professionals—now it's trickling down to ProAms, and soon (under 5 years) will be widespread for consumer applications. This changes how drugs are developed and applied (don't test... Radar Theme: Neuro-everything
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 5, 2008 [This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends were currently tracking here at O'Reilly: 1] Humans are consistently irrational, and every lottery ticket sold proves the point again. Psychologists, economists, neurobiologists are all studying what makes us behave the way we do. The promise is that we'll be able to be better: compensate for our... Radar Theme: Synthetic Biology
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 5, 2008 [This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends were currently tracking here at O'Reilly.] Drew Endy taught undergraduate students how to make e. coli bacteria that smelled like wintergreen, using his biobricks. This shows us a future for biology where "useful biological tasks" can be "automated" using "components". The quotes indicate where research and development... Guessing gender from browser history
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 5, 2008 I just found a clever trick for guessing gender from browser history. I tried it and then realized that I'm a crappy test for the system: yes, likelihood of my being male is 99%. But if I read a hardcore geek tech blog, then that's probably the case anyway. I could emulate that behaviour with a simple return(G_MALE) in the... Should Personal Genomics Be Regulated?
By Tim O'ReillyJuly 8, 2008 I read recently about the cease and desist letters sent to 23andme and other personal genomics companies selling tests directly to consumers. 23andme has responded, saying that they agree with the ultimate need for regulation, but that harnessing the consumer internet for personal genomics is a really valuable scientific tool. I have to say I find myself doubtful about the... Radar Roundup: Brains
By Nat TorkingtonMarch 17, 2008 Today's topic is: our brains, understanding how they work, and living with the consequences of that knowledge. Brain Enhancement: Right or Wrong? (NYT): amazing gray areas we're getting into. Is it okay for a scientist to take brain-enhancing drugs? Compare... Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk
By Jimmy GutermanMarch 16, 2008 At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted: Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I... Synthetic Biology and Personal Genomics
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 18, 2008 We've been watching synthetic biology closely since Drew Endy keynoted on open source biology at OSCON back in 2005 (audio here). You might have caught Quinn Norton's series of posts on Drew and his work (parts 1, 2, 3, 4,... Synthetic Biology: The conclusion of the very beginning
By Quinn NortonFebruary 5, 2008 Note: This ends Quinn Norton's five-part series on Drew Endy and synthetic biology. The earlier installments are Everything you needed to know about human-created life forms but were afraid to ask, The dummy's guide to engineering genes, Play God for... Managing the unimaginable future
By Quinn NortonFebruary 4, 2008 Note: This is the fourth of Quinn Norton's five-part series on Drew Endy and synthetic biology. The earlier installments are Everything you needed to know about human-created life forms but were afraid to ask, The dummy's guide to engineering genes,... The dummy's guide to engineering genes
By Quinn NortonFebruary 2, 2008 Note: Yesterday we began Quinn Norton's five-part series on Drew Endy and synthetic biology with "Everything you needed to know about human-created life forms but were afraid to ask." Photo courtesy of Mike & Amanda Knowles, via flickr. Dr. Drew... Play God for fun and profit (mostly fun)
By Quinn NortonFebruary 1, 2008 Note: This is the third of Quinn Norton's five-part series on Drew Endy and synthetic biology. The earlier installments are Everything you needed to know about human-created life forms but were afraid to ask and The dummy's guide to engineering... The dummy's guide to engineering genes
By Quinn NortonJanuary 31, 2008 Note: Yesterday we began Quinn Norton's five-part series on Drew Endy and synthetic biology with "Everything you needed to know about human-created life forms but were afraid to ask." Photo courtesy of Mike & Amanda Knowles, via flickr. Dr. Drew... Everything you needed to know about human-created life forms but were afraid to ask
By Quinn NortonJanuary 30, 2008 One of the great pleasures of being involved with O'Reilly Media is learning from the many fascinating people who get involved with the company on one level or another. They're Friends of O'Reilly, or Foos. We have occasional get-togethers with... 1 to 44 of 44 Stay Connected
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