Designer poo – coming to a toilet near you.
Synthetic biology is all about re-engineering living organisms to make them do stuff we would find useful — like eating oil spills or excreting superfuels. It’s a tall order, but we’re well on our way already. Still, a slightly easier tactic would be to just tweak thedesign of organisms that already exist, rather than building synthetic genomes from scratch. Designers Daisy Ginsberg and James King and their scientist colleagues at Cambridge University did exactly that with a project called E.Chromi, which turned e.colibacteria into living, color-coded sensors that can be “programmed” to secrete an array of bright hues in the presence of certain chemicals. In the future, E.Chromi-like bugs could live in your gut and give you an early-warning signal for an oncoming illness by turning your poop blue.
Via Fastcodesign
Matt Berry – Witchazel
Fans of the IT crowd and The Mighty Boosh wil be happy to see Matt Berry (a.k.a Dixon Bainbridge and Douglas Reynholm) has released an album. Surprisingly it’s all be made entirely in Apple’s Garageband in his front room, but sounds like finely polished, melodic pop, 60′s psychadelia and folky pop.
The rather touching video above, directed and filmed by Gerard Giorgi-Coll goes to prove that in most cases, big budget, auto-tune bling can be easily undermined by a bit of good old fashioned British talent, a full beard and a pheasant.
Self-proclaimed witch says human laws don’t apply to her
A SELF-proclaimed witch who says she is not subject to earthly laws is appealing against convictions for dangerous driving and recklessly causing injury after dragging a policeman by the arm for 190m.
Highton marriage celebrant Eilish De’Avalon told Sen-Constable Andrew Logan in February last year she was not subject to earthly laws because she was from another world.
“Your laws and penalties don’t apply to me. I’m not accepting them, I’m sorry, I must go, thank you,” De’Avalon said.
De’Avalon, 41, was jailed for two months, fined $1250 and her licence was disqualified.
Why did the three-toed sloth cross the road?
The best bit is when they pick Mr Sloth up and he thinks he’s Superman.
Armenia makes chess compulsory in schools
Armenia is to make chess a compulsory subject in primary schools in a bid to turn itself into a global force in the game, the education ministry have said. ”Teaching chess in schools will create a solid basis for the country to become a chess superpower,” said an official at the ministry, Arman Aivazian.
The authorities led by President Serzh Sarkisian, an enthusiastic supporter of the game, have committed around $1.43 million to the scheme – a large sum in the impoverished but chess-mad country.
More at NTDWA
Tim Minchin’s Storm the Animated Movie
Official animated movie of Tim Minchin’s 9-minute beat poem Storm. Written and performed by Tim Minchin. Directed and animated by DC Turner. Produced by Tracy King. www.stormmovie.net
Bronx Zoo’s missing cobra ‘speaks out’ on Twitter
BBC NEWS: “A tongue-in-cheek Twitter user giving “updates” on a missing deadly Egyptian cobra now has some 154,000 followers.
The 20in (50cm) venomous snake escaped from New York City’s Bronx Zoo on Friday, and is yet to be found.
In one tweet, BronxZoosCobra says: “On top of the Empire State Building! All the people look like little mice down there. Delicious little mice.”
In its Twitter account, The Bronx Zoo – which has some 8,000 followers – admits it is currently “the snake’s game”.
The identity of the person behind BronxZoosCobra’s tweets has not been revealed.
Citing the animals from the animated movie Madagascar as inspiration, the “snake” claims to be a huge fan of Tina Fey, but is not so keen on Donald Trump or those who work on Wall Street.
Listing location as “Not at the Bronx Zoo”, it has “visited” tourist attractions including the High Line, the museum of Natural History and Ray’s Pizza.
One of the more recent posts played on New Yorkers’ fears of the scaly escapee.
“It’s getting pretty cold out. I think it’s probably time to crash. Oh look, an apartment window someone left open just a crack. Perfect!”
Zoo officials said on Monday they were confident the adolescent Egyptian cobra was hiding in a non-public area of the Reptile House but conceded that finding it would be difficult.
The zoo closed the reptile house “until further notice”.”
Via BBC News
Science: How To Fake It
MAD ART LAB: “So you want to publish a fake science paper. Of course you do. Who doesn’t? But how do you go about it? Well, it’s a lot easier than you think. Just follow these simple steps…
Step 1: Pick a Subject
This is important. You’ll need to choose something that’s both popular and wrong. Things like “sticking needles in your skin cures disease” or “pets can telepathically detect when their owners are coming home” are pretty good. For this tutorial, though, we’ll use “common objects can bring you good luck” as an example.
Step 2: Prepare Your Experiment
Your experimental setup, of course, depends on the subject you’ve chosen. For this one, we’ll need a pair of dice and a bunch of objects to serve as good luck charms. The more the better. We want to run lots of trials, so gather up everything you can find: four leaf clovers, horse shoes, that pebble you found last week, Gerald your pet hamster, whatever happens to be lying around.”
“Step 3: Run Your Trials
Here’s where the magic starts. What you want to do is run lots and lots of trials, each with a small sample size. This will increase your chances of a false positive.
Step 4: Hunting The Wily Anomaly
Taken as a whole, your data will look pretty mundane. The chances of rolling, say, double sixes are 1 in 36, so you’re going to get about 2 or 3 per 100 rolls, give or take. Your results probably fit fairly well onto a bell curve, with most of the data points clustered in the middle and a few outliers on either side. But wait! If you rename some of those outliers “anomalies”, you’ve suddenly got a phenomenon!”
Continue reading the rest over at Mad Art Lab (Thanks Annette M)
Cory Doctorow denounces Jediism
The Register: When Cory Doctorow, creative freedoms campaigner, author of Little Brother and co-editor of the massive Boing Boing blog, tweeted yesterday that “we’re all going to put our #religion down as #Jedi”, the response was instantaneous.
A flurry of counter-tweets followed, with reaction typified by the likes of Andrew Carter, who tweeted: “NO! It screws up the demographics and makes it look like there are fewer ‘Non-religious’ than there are!”
Doctorow thought about it, and shortly after, his blog conceded an absolute about-turn. He wrote: “When I joked on Twitter that my family were going to list ourselves as Jedi, I was deluged with outraged responses from atheists asking me to tick the ‘no religion’ box; this is part of a larger campaign to get people who tick ‘Christian’ out of habit (though they have no faith) to switch to ‘no religion’ as well, as some atheists believe that the number of religious people in the UK is misreported through a combination of habitual box-ticking and smart-alecky ‘Jedi’ like me.” He concluded: “I’m convinced; we’re atheists and we will list ourselves as such.”
Full Story at The Register
Jedi-ism, Britain’s fourth-largest religion.
In 2001, when the last Census of the UK was carried out, nearly 400,000 people claimed “Jedi” as their religion. Not only did this confirm Jedi-ism as a religion in the UK – but meant it was the fourth largest, with more followers than Judaism or Buddhism.
With the 2011 Census forms sealed in their envelopes and ready to post to households across Britain, numerous Facebook groups have been created to encourage even more people to put their faith in the ‘Force’ and claim to be Jedis.
The religion question is the only voluntary question on the form but Mr Benton says that the responses directly affect community services. “People are developing their local policy and activities on the basis of this information. I would urge people to give an accurate response,” he said.
The Times sent a video team to one of the largest Star Wars memorabilia shops in the UK to find out just who considers themselves a Jedi.
Via Richard Dawkins – Full article at The Times (paywall)
