My TED talk on Oct 13 at TEDxUOttawa
Photos and thoughts from the interface between biology, technology, art and science in the Pelling Lab.
Also, experiments on mass-produced and disposable living organisms.
Pelling Lab Website
C-LAB Review
Wow, just saw a nice review of my Subtle Technologies talk by the awesome people at C-LAB (LINK). Thanks!
Biohacking and Weird Shit at TED
I’m really pleased to announce I will be giving a TED talk next month. October 13, 2012 at the University of Ottawa. Details about the final lineup are yet to be officially announced but I’m sure they will be posted here.
Pecha Kucha Ottawa vol 6
I was honoured to give a talk about our work a few nights ago at Pecha Kucha Ottawa (Link, Link), hosted in the beautiful Shopify Lounge in the Byward Market. There were some absolutely incredible talks by local hackers, artists, coders and generally creative people around ottawa. It was high company indeed!
The Shopify Lounge:
Yours Truly:
And a pretty awesome piece in the stairway of Shopify (relevant because I’m going owl banding in a few weeks)
Online 6-Well Plate … (ahem …. Cells with a Twitter Account) - Progress
The lab received some fun geek stuff from sparkfun.com this week, including some components for a little side-project I’ve been working on - creating a platform to measure data out of cell culture and put it online (via twitter). This is, of course, related to our tweeting organs project and builds on the same Processing code and Arduino hardware I’ve been tinkering with (many thanks to RobotGrrl and Ashley Hughes for some very helpful code/tutorials).
The 6-well plate is in the foreground and is the platform I’m working with right now. The top and bottom of the plate will have embedded sensors I will use to track cell growth: light absorbance through the culture using LilyPad Micro LEDs and TEMT6000 ambient light sensors AND electrical resistance through cell monolayers using some fun tricks with platinum wire). Tonight I’ve been working on planning and cleaning up the wiring. I hope to post again soon with an assembled prototype (depends on how crazy my week is).
As you can see above, everything will be controlled with an Arduino Mega 2650. Data will be sent wirelessly via an XBee Series 1 to a computer in my main molecular biology and microscopy lab which is next door to the culture lab.
Other than posting data to twitter which is a little boring, I’m planning and testing ways to give twitter users control over the physiological conditions of the culture. I’m really intrigued by the possibility (and host of techno/ethical problems which will follow) of allowing internet users to control cell culture and being as hands off as possible. I think this will take some time to implement but should be interesting. In the meantime hopefully soon you will be able to follow our cells on twitter (and perhaps receive messages from them after I figure out what to do with all the data I’ve been able to pull down off twitter with Processing). More to come …..
Hmmmm …..
Oh and my Raspberry Pi arrived today! Only took about two months after pre-ordering from Newark (not bad I think). Its sitting waiting for me and I’m really annoyed by all the other stuff I need to do before I can play with it.
