Tag: BACTERIA

This, dear readers, is sadly not a robotic jellyfish. Bacterioptica, designed by MadLab, is a chandelier whose light is filtered through bacterial colonies. Why, you ask? We wonder, too. Each lamp is fitted with a petri dish that allows the lamp to "evolve" as it grows full of various prokaryotes. MadLab's site is light on the details, but it mentions that the chandelier "is living and ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. The simplest ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. In 1855, ...

By now, everybody knows there's a massive e-waste problem on the horizon, though some U.K. researchers claim to have found a way to cut down on e-waste and fight bacterial infections at the same time. According to a press release from the University of York, researchers melted LCD TVs and extracted a substance that could be used to destroy some bacteria. Since this team estimated that about 2.5 ...

Share Ah, New York City. The teeming masses, the crowded subways, broad avenues and millions of people. All touching iPads. With over two million of Apple's wonder gadget sold, just think of how many people have tried the product out for themselves. With the Fifth Avenue Apple Store a practical landmark, the amount of curious consumers -- tourists and natives alike -- that trek in to touch the ...

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have just created an entirely new synthetic life form in a laboratory, marking a watershed moment that could radically alter the way humans interact with nature. As Wired reports, the achievement is a culmination of over two-years' worth of research, numerous failed attempts and millions of dollars. In March, however, the team injected over a million ...

All writers want their words to be immortalized in posterity, but poet Christian Bök has some serious issues with his work falling under the sands of time. Bök is planning to inscribe his poetry within the DNA of a tough-as-nails bacterium known as Deinococcus radiodurans so that it will potentially last for billions of years. The bacterium can survive acids, freezing temperatures, ...

Share It's a universal truth that the more time you spend in front of your computer, the grosser your keyboard gets. While we may be able to wipe away the grease stains and breadcrumb trails that late night snacking leaves in its wake, there's another, more microscopic residue that we can't wipe away -- and it may say a lot more about us than just our eating habits. A new study conducted ...

What do a bunch of fluorescent, blinking bacteria mean for your health? Surprisingly enough, it's good news. According to PopSci, a new discovery made by scientists at the University of California at San Diego could lead to time-released medications controlled by your body's biological feedback. Basically, the scientists use a phenomena called quorum sensing to get a colony of E. coli to read ...

Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema recently won the €10,000 (about $14,000) Rado Prize at the Dutch Design Awards for, among other work, his typography project Symbiosis. Van Abbema used living bacteria to form lettering by stamping the critters onto paper with letterpress type, and then set them in a home-made incubator. Their metastasis and ultimate demise created typographic forms that ...

Professor Charles Gerba of the University of Arizona is very interested in what's growing on your cell phone, and we're not talking about your bill. He's been testing cell phones and finding that, in general, they're riddled with germs and bacteria that can cause skin infections. In an informal on-the-street test he ran 11 phones through his "germ meter" test, which counted the number of nasties ...