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

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

To see what would happen if a child did that, here are the first Google instant search autocomplete for A to Z (your mileage may vary).

a is for Amazon
b is for Best Buy
c is for Craigslist
d is for Dictionary
e is for Ebay
f is for Facebook
g is for Gmail
h is for Hotmail
i is for Ikea
j is for Jet Blue
k is for Khols
l is for Lowes
m is for Mapquest
n is for Netflix
o is for Orbitz
p is for Pandora
q is for quotes(brainyquote)
r is for REI
s is for Sears
t is for Target
u is for USPS
v is for Verizon
w is for weather
x is for Xbox
y is for Yahoo
z is for Zillow

If you try searching for ww, you will get www.facebook.com(showing its power), What’s missing in this list? Amazon trumps Apple, no Microsoft, though there is an Xbox, weather beats Wikipedia, G is for Gmail not Google.

pingpong ball matrix (2x7x8)

Originally uploaded by Dr Brian
@coldclimate and @sc_r making things during howduino

Howduino, what a great event/weekend at the centre for life.
So we had two days of 6 hours each to make stuff around arduino or electronics in general. There were a lot of matrix light projects from @coldclimates and @sc_r s ping pong matrixes, to lee and friends amazing skip finds (two great matrix displays). Another theme was that of remote controll, with @alistair controlling a servo over the internet, and another team a remote controll car from their computer.
There was also the hacking of an animatronic head(yoda like) and the control of housegold power sockets(peter) through a networked arduino. Sophie did a squigglebot, and there was a whiteboard drawer, thom did a dalek that found your face (using the webcam) and pointed his blue led laser gun at you. @oomlout contributed to a lot of the projects, and jim of @sonodrome demoed using a led as an input(light detecting) and output(light  o) device, nice one
These are all the ones I remember, but it would be great to get a complete list.

What did I do?
Investigated using a ldr to get an idea of motor spin speed. In the future this will be great for getting an idea of how fast a centrifuge is spinning, or using it as a counter for bees entering and leaving a beehive.