Dr. John Conway’s cellular automation simulation, the Game of Life has been accentuated with some 8-bit beeps and boops! This project, uploaded by YouTube user golece576, was run on an Altera Cyclone II FPGA. [Via Embedded Ppojects
Engin Ayaz, Tak Cheung, and Doug Kanter created HeartWave, a tabletop device which uses water ripples to visualize the heartbeat of two people at once. The sides of the tank are equipped with Polar heart beat sensors, which actuate electromagnets to pulse a fin, generating each wave. According to Doug, “variations in liquid and lighting allow for a range of unique HeartWave experiences.”
This commercial plugs the Veriti Thermal Cycler, and used over 6,000 PCR tube and 30 plates in the filming, which took an entire month. [Via @cenmag]
Brown University Engineering and Visual Arts lecturer Ian Gonsher’s Generative Construction Toy is a set of snap together shapes that you can cut out on a laser cutter and use as building blocks to design and build compound three dimensional objects. It’s like an evolving desktop fab version of tinker toys or LEGO, but more organic. What’s most interesting about the GCT is that you are encouraged to modify and create your own shapes through an iterative process of design and play.
At the Center for Biorobotics in Estonia, Eszter Ozsvald built a mechanical fish named A.riel that can model the movements of actual fish surprisingly well, and using only one servo inside a carefully made silicon-based mold. It took many iterations before the final product, but found that in the end she could develop the same vortex patterns as actual fish. Her site has extensive documentation on the build process and is definitely worth a look for the mold-making processes alone.
This page at the University of Oregon bills itself as “the world’s largest collection of anatomically correct fabric brain art.” Shown here is Dr. Karen Norberg’s The Knitted Brain.
This is the “Hello World” of biotech. You will make cells that glow! Adding jellyfish genes to bacteria might sound like it’s complicated, but it’s easy!
