MAKE writes: Mac Cowell recently started the site DIYBio as a resource for biohackers working outside academic and industrial labs.
DIYbio is an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.
Botanicalls: The Plants Have Your Number
Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding.
Botanicalls allows plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their botanical characteristics.
http://www.botanicalls.com
(via MAKE: Blog)
Factory Fresh Plants
A photo collage contest from Worth1000.com:
Imagine taking the finest ideas industry has to offer, and combining them with Mother Nature’s finest.
You would end up with USB flowers. A 5-speed cactus. Maybe even a gear driven Venus Fly Trap. What can you come
up with?
The rules of this game are thus: Take any plant and make it electronic or mechanical. As always, quality is a
must. You’ll have 48 hours for this contest, so make your submissions count.
http://www.worth1000.com/cache/contest/contestcache.asp?contest_id=7917&display=photoshop#entries
via: Boing Boing
semeiotica: recombining contemporary art and life science
A blog by Gabriel Harp:
“semeiotica is Italian for symptomatology (sim’t?-m?-tol’?-je) n. The medical science of symptoms -or- the combined symptoms of a disease.
Here I describe and catalogue research examining the relationships of art, design, science, and biology. Sometimes they intersect. Sometimes they conflict. Conflict begets development. Development demands synthesis.”
http://www.semeiotica.com
Involuntary Parks
Science Fiction author and agitator Bruce Sterling publishes semi-regular “Viridian Notes,” which often feature wonderful concepts like “involuntary parks” created when humans abandon (or are forced out of) large tracts of land.
Bioacoustics-L mailing list
The Bioacoustics-L mailing list is for discussion of any subjects related to the scientific study of sound in the natural world, including animal communication, sonar, acoustic behavior, sound production, hearing physiology and auditory processes, signal processing for bioacoustics, the impact of noise on animals, acoustic tracking, and any other topics that may come up. Discussion of experimental methods and equipment, queries for information, announcements of results, and raising of public policy questions answerable by science are all welcome.
