100 Ideas

"One a year" - A pre-retrospective: 2008-2108

About

I’m Mac Cowell. I’m an amateur biologist. I like diybio.org. I’m interested in synthetic biology and refactoring and reengineering existing biological tools and techniques to be cheaper, easier, safer, and more accessible.

Colophon

I'm Mac Cowell. I'm an amateur biologist. I'm a part of diybio.org. I'm interested in synthetic biology and refactoring and reengineering existing biological tools and techniques to be cheaper, easier, safer, and more accessible.

Syndicate

July 20th 2010
Tags: DIYbio, hardware, microbiology

One Comment

ucam ps3eye magnification test

On and off over the last 6 months I've been working on a 2-axis arduino controlled servo powered low-cost stage and usb microscope, inspired by Marc Dusseiller's work . Today I hooked up a ps3eye w/ an inverted lens and attempted to calculate its magnification factor. I also made some ...
March 31st 2010
Tags: DIYbio, hardware

One Comment

Synthetic Aesthetics Proposal

Synthetic Aesthetics is an upcoming program designed to bring 6 synthetic biologists and 6 designers together in a month-long mutually beneficial collaboration. The goal is to to bring together synthetic biologists, social scientists, designers, artists, and other creative practitioners, to explore existing and potential collaborations between synthetic biology and ...
February 26th 2010
Tags: DIYbio, good ideas

No Comments

multitouch $50 microscope

Testing a multitouch interface to a 2-axis microscope stage powered by cheap servo motors, controlled by an arduino, processing, and TUIO events from an iPhone. My dream is to be able to put my fingers on giant microbes and swipe them around. Based on diybio.org/ucam. ucam development 25 Feb 2010 ...
January 15th 2010
Tags: DIYbio, bioluminescence, microbiology

3 Comments

Culturing bioluminescent microbes, part 1

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="1-second exposure overlayed with a 30-second (slightly warped to optimize registration) overlayed using photoshop's "lighten" blending mode at 100% opacity. More photos at flickr"][/caption] I've been fascinated by bioluminescence from the first time I saw pictures of deep-sea angler fish. Since then, I've seen dozens ...
August 19th 2009
Tags: Uncategorized

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The Upshot of Diagnostic Kits

As part of the interview process, Carolina Rossini asked me to write a short report on "The Problems of Patents on Diagnostic Testing Kits" (pdf). Later that summer, I read Steven Levy's "Hackers: The Heros of the Computer Revolution." Now I've started to see an analogy between the tools used by nascent ...

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