cagapakis
Posts by this author
July 5, 2011
Oscillator is moving to the brand new Scientific American network! I'm excited for this new opportunity and sad to be leaving my old home here. I want to give many special thanks to SEED people past and present for their help and support, in particular Nikki, Erin, Greg, Evan, and Wes. And of…
June 14, 2011
I'm making my way up to SB 5.0 for what promises to be a great conference. If you're going too, come say hi and smell some cheeses during the poster session!
June 10, 2011
I got a long email from one of the authors of the skull measuring study and I want to make some clarifications to my previous post. It seems that I was not as clear and thorough as I could have been in my argument.
First, my sincere apologies to all physical anthropologists and other researchers…
June 9, 2011
It's not every day that you read about measuring skulls in the contemporary scientific literature. It's kind of a quaintly old-timey, quaintly racist kind of thing to do. But here we are, with a brand new paper about skull measuring in PLoS Biology. Already quite a few blog-words have been…
May 9, 2011
Last month I wrote about my friend Devin Burrill's paper about synthetic memory in yeast cells. There were a lot of really interesting questions left in the comments, and I asked Devin if she would write a guest post to answer them. She agreed and here it is, answers to your questions straight from…
May 5, 2011
It's been an exciting week for me. On Monday I successfully defended my thesis! Now that I have established my scientific credibility to you all, here is a picture of me at my defense party wearing my "Trust me I'm a Dr" Dr. Pepper t-shirt and hitting my SpongeBob SquarePants piñata.
And on…
April 25, 2011
Two videos that Patrick Boyle and I made were selected for the Bio:Fiction Film Festival! One of the prizes is an online audience award, and you can watch and rate all of the films! It's such an honor to be part of this festival and to be showing our work next to that of so many amazing artists,…
April 22, 2011
Beautiful video imagining the future of augmented, prosthetic sight, by Superflux for the Human+ exhibition:
Song of the Machine from Superflux on Vimeo.
You can read more about the science behind retinal prosthetics in a great article in the Guardian by one of the project collaborators, Dr.…
April 20, 2011
Symbiosis is everywhere. From the Greek for "living with," symbiosis is simply a close association between two different species in nature. These relationships can be mutualistic, parasitic, or somewhere in between. Bacterial symbionts live inside bodies, like the bacteria that help us and other…
April 16, 2011
Before you get your tickets for SB 5.0 make sure that you'll be in town for the world's first Synthetic Biology Slam!
April 6, 2011
Valerie Weiss is not just a film director with a fun new movie coming out, she's also a scientist. After getting her PhD from Harvard (from the same lab as me!) she created PhD Productions, and her newest film is a quirky romantic comedy look at the life of a neurotic graduate student. "Losing…
April 1, 2011
Perhaps you have noticed that I haven't been blogging very much lately. Probably not, which is why I don't ever do these "sorry for not posting" posts, but I'm making an exception this time because it is a very special occasion. So, apologies for my recent lack of posts, but I got married last…
March 11, 2011
Cells permanently change their behavior in response to temporary changes to the environment, a kind of biological memory that controls processes as important and complex as how stem cells differentiate into specific tissues or how the immune system "remembers" dangerous pathogens. At its simplest,…
March 2, 2011
I recently learned that one of my advisors and mentors is not only a great scientist, but also a poet. This poem was written a few years ago for his biotech company's clean-up day poetry contest and won him a $5 gift certificate to Dunkin Donuts. I think it's actually quite good and deserves more…
February 19, 2011
Changing our energy infrastructure from one that contributes to climate change to one that is renewable and sustainable poses enormous challenges technically, politically, socially, and economically. There isn't going to be a single solution, but a combination of technological changes, policy…
February 15, 2011
One organism's trash is another organism's treasure. Our cellular wastes, carbon dioxide and water, nourish plants, which with added energy from sunlight produce the oxygen and sugars that we need to survive. At microscopic scales, these cycles of waste and food can get much more complicated, with…
February 12, 2011
I had a great conversation with Maggie Koerth-Baker from BoingBoing for bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday. We talked about all sorts of sciency stuff, including her upcoming book on the challenges of renewable energy, synthetic biology, the similarities between cheese and the human body, women in…
February 11, 2011
Synthetic biologists work on designing living cells, but engineered bacteria don't usually come up when you think of "designer" things. This year however, a synthetic biology design is up for a Brit Insurance Design of the Year award, up against the Lanvin Spring collection, Angry Birds, and Rock…
February 4, 2011
The Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative Graduate Consortium hosted a fun workshop during the January term where students learned about microscopy by taking some amazing pictures of food microbes. The images taken with the scanning electron microscope of sauerkraut, kombucha, and some stinky…
February 1, 2011
Scientists aren't known for their fashion sense, but they do have their own unique charm, as you can see in this episode of In The Lab, with Bill Cunningham.
January 30, 2011
All the science blogs are talking about it. Where are all the female science bloggers? The question itself and the long lists of great bloggers who happen to be female bring up a lot of interesting questions about what makes a good blog, what is best for blog (self-)promotion, who is in what…
January 26, 2011
I've been playing a bit with the alpha of Qwiki, a new website that offers users an innovative "information experience." The site collects images, videos, and text about topics from the internet and then displays the images future-aesthetically while reading the information in a delightful robot…
January 23, 2011
Industrial food production separates us from our food, increasing the distance from living thing to food product. As factories continue to import corn and export almost everything we eat, writers like Michael Pollan urge us to eat "real" food, and projects like the Slow Food movement have gained…
January 20, 2011
What do you get when you combine two of my favorite things, synthetic biology and documentary film? We may never know if Sam and George don't get the funding they need on Kickstarter!
I don't usually do this kind of thing, but I met these guys while they were filming in Boston and their movie…
January 19, 2011
My friend Patrick is embarking on a 48 experiment, studying circadian rhythm and destroying his own in the process. He's also embarking on a social media experiment, live-streaming the whole thing on ustream.
Tune in to watch real science in action and the effects of sleep deprivation on…
January 16, 2011
Yesterday I mentioned Symbiotic Households, an art project imagining genetically engineered mosquitoes that provide mood stabilizing compounds to a population plagued by worries caused by climate change. Today on twitter I saw a link to a US patent application filed by Microsoft about engineering…
January 15, 2011
With The Symbiotic Household, Elliott P. Montgomery seeks to find answers to problems caused by climate change. Low-cost, low energy solutions are proposed through complex genetic engineering of domesticated insects--"What better way to deal with a future need than with a future technology?"
The…
December 8, 2010
Evolution connects all living things on earth, from the arsenic tolerant bacteria in the news this week to the human scientists and bloggers chatting about it. Eyes are intricately complex structures made up of many many cells, but even single-celled microbes can sense and respond to light through…
December 7, 2010
An incredible (if unscientific) look at the history of life:
The video has been around for a few months and has a gajillion hits so sorry if I'm late to the party, I just had to share!
By Blu, via Bio Fiction
November 26, 2010
It's been a few weeks since the iGEM jamboree, a whirlwind, completely exhausting weekend of student synthetic biology projects. This tweet from Robin Sloan from the #igem2010 stream is a pretty good way to sum up the weekend:
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Tweets tagged #igem2010 right now read like dispatches from the…