Amateur biotech is starting to heat up — witness Biocurious, the new biology-focused hackerspace. DIY bio enthusiast Cathal Garvey analyzes the state of affairs: DIYbio and its more professionally oriented cousin, Garage Biotech, are undergoing a revolution at present. Essential equipment that used to cost thousands is now available at affordable prices, in many cases […]
…but non-lepidopterists will probably be hard-pressed to figure that out just by looking at it. The video rates high on the jaw-dropping scale. The ChouChou electric butterfly is, in fact, a lepidoteroid robot, of sorts, from Japanese firm Tenyo Magic. It perches, flexes and flaps its wings, and flutters around its jar when disturbed. Preorderable now from JapanTrends.com. [via NOTCOT]
Depending on your tolerance for preserved corpses, this may strike you as incredibly cool or incredibly creepy. Maybe a little bit of both. Personally, I lean toward the “cool” side. “Clearing and staining” is actually a very old technique in anatomy and biology in which a dead animal is treated with a series of chemicals that simultaneously preserve it, render its soft tissues transparent, and stain its skeletal and nervous systems different colors. The resulting preserved specimens are both scientifically useful and, often, strikingly beautiful. These pictures are from a Japanese gallery; here’s an English-language gallery of mutant frog specimens that are also pretty amazing. [via Core77]
This tree is from an analysis of small subunit rRNA sequences sampled
from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life. The species were chosen based on their availability, but we attempted to include most of the major groups, sampled
very roughly in proportion to the number of known species in each group (although many
groups remain over- or under-represented). The number of species represented is approximately the square-root of the number of species thought to exist on Earth
(i.e., three thousand out of an estimated nine million species), or about 0.18% of the 1.7 million species that have been formally described and named.
Just last week we mentioned the OpenPCR project and included a link to their Kickstarter page. Throughout the week support for the project poured in from all over the Internet and eventually the project surpassed their initial target. Then on Friday the project hit a snag. The heated lid that warms the top of the tubes kept burning out. That’s when Tito Jankowski decided to post a question soliciting feedback on O’Reilly Answers.
From Pat and Tim of BotHacker, printed on their RepStrap. STL files available on Thingiverse.
If you haven’t seen the work of Makers Market seller kaitrees before, well…this photo sums it up way better than I ever could in words: His work is amazing, and the way he does it is amazing, too.
