transitlab

09 Apr, 2011

Lead users in #DIYbio

Posted by: Brian In: Uncategorized

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Imagine you find a problem with your dataset the day before you submit your thesis.
Could you regenerate it automatically?
Ana is describing how we might deal with this by using scripts
Costs may include more effort, need to learn new skills. Benefits are error reduction, reproducibility, standardization, and more.

Dexy.it is the tool she has developed.

It may also be used in Literate Programming.

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Bringing semantics to make rare disease data interoperable.

Primary immune diseases are rare, complex and plentiful. The most common is 1/2000 least common is 1/2000000

There are already 220 different ones, expected to rise. Phentoypes/symptoms are varied. Wouldn’t it be nice to teach a computer to understand PID. So teach the computer to understand phenotypes.

 

 

 

 

Its hard to find information about rare diseases. For example PID which should be Primary Immunity Disease.

Wiskott Aldrich Syndrome ESID,

PIDFinder is the tool that has been developed

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Giant Petri Dish

Originally uploaded by Dr Brian 

 

As part of the Laboratory Life(Lighthouse Arts, Brighton) project “Infective Textiles” it was necessary to incubate calico panels of a regency dress pattern with bacteria.

Usually bacteria are cultured in small plastic dishes called petri dishes. These contain nutrient agar to support the growth.
With the standard petri dish being at most a 30 cm wide, and the calico panels being a lot larger, a new type of petri dish was called for – a DIY one.
The large petri dish was constructed from plastic sheeting, tape, thin bamboo and much plasticine. Basically the bamboo was encapsulated in the plastic with a fold and sealed in with double sided tape. This raised the edge of the plastic so that it would be like a very shallow play pool.  The final size was a L-shape of approximately 2m x 1m.
Then using a recipe sourced from Dr Simon Park(using standard household ingredients), we made 18 L of gel. Given the size, it was not sterile but given that we we then innoculated with plate scrapings from 20 plates of environmental bacteria, there was not much cause to be worried by contamination.

 

 

Growth Conditions
48hours at 26C {we raised the heating of the room}
kill cycle 3hrs at 70C in a domestic oven

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About

Brian Degger is a technologist/artist, he writes, thinks and makes around themes of interactivity, biomimicracy, and collaboration

RSS 25sg residency

Asides

PDF import and editing in openoffice
One function I have found useful in openoffice is the ability to import pdfs. This is possible by downloading and installing the pdfimport plugin. This means that you can import a pdf, edit it then output it at a lower resolution for screen. (2)

miniFM

miniFM
In the foreground is a Tetsuo Kogawa version (built during RadioCraftLab, during AVFest08) and in the back the remix by sonodrome (built last week at Sonodrome Central). Both assembled by me.
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Bioplastic
Jay Cousins and friends had a hackday around bioplastics and laser cutting. Making the bioplastic from starch and glycerin (see this link for more details) and then laser cutting them. Cool stuff, they were even making different color ones. This is important as people move from using commercially sourced plastic in their makerbots to something else. Plastic is expensive to buy for these machines, but it is all around. SO be it bio-plastic or post waste plastic, ways of reusing these provide a compelling reason to throw away less waste. It is amazing that these materials are coming out of the factories, to be used in domestic situations. Together with polymorph and sugru, there are a variety of materials to play around for wearables, for prototypes and one offs. Bring on the future, with peer production.

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augmented foraging - cool use of layar -

augmented foraging Originally uploaded by _foam A mobile phone guide to edible urban wild-food sources.
Amsterdam urban_ edibles is developing Augmented_Foraging, a  mobile phone guide to wild-food sources using Layar. Much better use of this program than finding property in Amsterdam (unless you live there of course)!
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