bio.display

Today the Hungarian newspaper HVG mentions bio.display in a feature about 3D printers in general, and its use in edible printing & medical applications.

Using the same method to create the flashing signs, the researchers engineered a simple bacterial sensor capable of detecting low levels of arsenic. In this biological sensor, decreases in the frequency of the oscillations of the cells’ blinking pattern indicate the presence and amount of the arsenic poison.

• read more in the Physorg.com article

nice.

• read more on Popular Science
• read more on PC Mag

A similar approach to that used in bio.display has been utilized by David Walt, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University. They use fluorescent proteins of various colors to be able to encode 49 different characters, thus being able to encode the 26 letters of the English alphabet and 23 different kinds of signs.

They imprint the messages by placing e.coli into an agar gel, just like in bio.display. To read / decode the messages one has to activate the fluorescent protein genes in the e.coli – the same mechanism used in bio.display to make the images emerge.

• A Different Kind of Secret Code – Science Mag article
• Secret Codes in Bacteria – Bruce Schneier’s blog

Today I’ll hold a presentation about bio.display at the blinkBL_NK #9 event in Singapore, at Speakeasy, starting 7pm. Other presenters include Denisa Kera, Tim Merritt and Benjamin Joffe.

the bio.display project is featured on the front page of the Hungarian online newspaper HVG, together with other bio art projects.

• HVG article – in Hungarian

The Fab@Home 3D printer I used to create the bacteria prints is now being utilized by hackerspace budapest, a new formation created by IT enthusiasts in Budapest, Hungary. I really hope they will make good use of the hardware & contribute to the effort of developing a cross-platform control software for the Fab@Home printer.

Simon Park & Anne Brodie have created a photo booth where they take photographs by illuminating their subjects by bacterial bioluminescence – light generated by bacteria – instead of traditional light sources.

The created images are quite interesting.

• Bioart Windsor blog entry

Jelte van Abbema just won the Dutch Radio Prize for his project – printing by letting bacteria grow an fill in the area that should be colored.

Congratulations!

• via de zeen

Last weekend I held a short presentation about the bio.display project at the ART+COMMUNICATION 2009: ENERGY conference in Riga, Latvia, organized by RIXC. It was an interesting setting, as bio.display is not directly related to energy consumption.

It was also interesting to see Riga again – last time I was here I was at ART+COMMUNICATION 4, in 2000…