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Are you ready for the synthetic biology future? A recent synthetic biology conference described bacteria that could live on Mars, feel empathy, eliminate malaria from mosquitos and cure cancer. Oscillator's Christina Agapakis explains. More »
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On paper, The Crazies sounds like a B-grade cliche: Bioweapons-made zombies terrorize small town. But the movie defies expectations. The Crazies is a scary, smart thriller that tweaks its tropes and offers a non-preachy fable about the military's dark side. More »
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While I was a huge fan of the anime AEon Flux, I'm willing to admit that the Charlize Theron movie based on the series flopped for good reason. The plot felt cliched, the dialogue was bad, and Theron never convinced me she was a badass. I mean, she never even grits her teeth ferchrissake. But the concept design in AEon Flux was positively breathtaking, as you can see in this clip. More »
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Art professor Steve Kurtz's wife, Hope, died in her sleep in May 2004. When Kurtz called 911, however, the police saw petri dishes and a mobile DNA-extraction machine and called in the feds. Kurtz tried to explain that the high-school-level lab equipment was part of an art project he and Hope had been doing about genetically modified foods, but the FBI decided he was a bioterrorist. This case still continues nearly four years later, and a new direct-to-DVD movie, Strange Culture, uses Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan and other actors to unravel one of the scariest cases of science fiction dictating legal actions in recent history. We talked to the director, Lynn Hershman Leeson. More »
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Want to make the goo in a petri dish spell out the words "Hello World"? Now you can. Biopunk provocateur Quinn Norton is writing a five-part series for O'Reilly Radar about how you can start hacking yourself and your friends for fun (and, occasionally, profit). If her excellent introduction to biohacking isn't enough for you, download this Open Biohacking Kit from Sourceforge and get started with making glow-in-the-dark bacteria in your garage. More »
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The latest electron microscopes can create three-dimensional images of the smallest structures, turning an agricultural pest into a work of art. This is the cowpea mosaic virus, scourge of legume farmers everywhere, vitrified and subjected to a single particle reconstruction procedure by FEI Corp. You can easily make out the blue outer protein shell and the yellow viral genomic material inside. Maybe soon we'll be able to hack viruses as easily as we can image them. Image by FEI Corp. [FEI] More »
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It was the first time I ever went to an art show where the art had gotten unruly and climbed outside its frame. A Sunshine-looking installation by Philip Ross of plants growing inside glass tubes of water (above) had turned into a jungle of plants breaking out of their transparent prisons and in some cases actually knocking bits of the sculpture onto the floor. It was the perfect example of how bio-art works: created from living materials, it breeds and grows and behaves just as illogically as life itself. This was just one of the reasons I was fascinated by the recent BioTechnique art show at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. More »
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Yes, there are biology hackers. They're scientists with wet labs who are reverse-engineering the genomes of fruit flies, mice, chimps, and (sometimes) humans. But pretty soon, the neighbor kid is going to be whipping up little half-human, half-possum creatures in her EZ Bake tissue engineering oven. That's why you need to watch MIT biology professor Drew Endy's lecture called "Programming DNA" from the recent Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin. More »
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