From a nice San Jose Mercury News story on DIYbio session at the fourth annual Maker Faire: “At their booth, the DIYbio crowd performed a simple but elegant DNA project: 1) Spit in a cup. 2) Add a drop of soap, 3.) Swirl in a pinch of salt and 4) Pour in rubbing alcohol — […]
Mention genetically modified anything to most sustainable food folks, and you can be pretty sure what you’re going to get: plenty of eye rolling and perhaps a heartfelt, self-righteous diatribe. This Greenpeace link sums up the view pretty well, I think. Looking for a way to reconcile my own whole-hearted enthusiasm for sustainable, organic food […]
The ACLU and the nonprofit Public Patent Foundation last week jointly filed a lawsuit against the PTO, Myriad Genetics, and the University of Utah Research Foundation, claiming the latter parties’ patents on the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are associated with breast and ovarian cancer, are unconstitutional and invalid. More than 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and […]
From the New York Times today: “An English chemist has found the hidden gateway to the RNA world, the chemical milieu from which the first forms of life are thought to have emerged on earth some 3.8 billion years ago … [solving] a problem that for 20 years has thwarted researchers trying to understand the […]
Although the farmers’ market report sometimes makes me miss California so much it brings tears to my eyes, I love listening to podcasts of Evan Kleiman’s intelligent and eclectic show Good Food on KCRW. A recent episode featured a discussion with Hynden Walch (a voice actor behind such animated characters as Starfire in the animated […]
One of the cooler little innovations I stumbled onto last week, a creation of the interactive group POKE. BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo. No laptop or cell phone required — just twist the knob on the device until the baked good you’re taking out displays on the screen, then hit the button to send out […]
I love this — grassy hills shaped like waves, constructed in an abandoned gravel pit — featured in the New York Times today. (The Times site also has a video about Lin and this project.) Storm King, about an hour north of NYC, is a 500-acre open-air museum of large (like, huge) modern sculpture, including […]
It would take giant space robots with grappling hooks to pull me away from pork eating. As a matter of fact, I’m putting in my order now for a pasture-raised pig share from Farmer’s Table in Vergennes, VT. Making sure to order enough this year so that I won’t, in a moment of weakness, resort […]