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Jacob Shiach over at opensciencefund.org has been organizing a t-shirt design contest. The proceeds are split between diybio.org and opensciencefund.org and the winning designer gets $100 and a free shirt.
Jacob says:
Everyone is welcome and encouraged to vote for the first DIYbio t-shirt until June 6th at midnight when the ballot will close and the winning design will be announced.
The Ballot is located at here.
For those that want to make sure they get in on the first batch pre-orders are available at a discounted $10 at etsy.com.
Here are some of the submitted designs:
p.s. the last is a design that is probably impractical to print by yours truly and was “submitted” on July 2, so it might not officially be in the running.
Fred Hapgood, Shawn Finney-Manchester, Marc Rogers, Laura, Keegan Cooke, John at sprout.
This month, Keegan Cooke brought materials to prototype several Microbial Fuel Cell kits he’s developing, I demoed my updated $50 arduino-controlled microscope, and Jason Bobe gave an update about the BioWeatherMap Project Alpha. He has actually got metagenomic data now.
Keegan explains the basics of Microbial Fuel Cells
Before the meetup, Keegan said
“I’ll bring some ingredients to put in the MFCs (soil, sugar, etc.), but I think it would be fun if you told people to bring some leftovers from their refrigerator (no more than a cup of it) and we’ll see who’s leftovers the microbes like the best (i.e. who’s leftovers generate the most power).”
What food or compost products will be converted into the most power? Can’t wait to find out. Keegan took the assembled MFCs back to his workshop for measurement. It takes a week or so for the anode’s environment to become oxygen-free, at which point the electrogenic microbes from the collected soil start colonizing the anode and “breathing” their electrons onto it.
Later, I hastily assembled the latest design for the two-axis computer-controlled slide holder. It’s designed to work with webcams that have been hacked into microscopes. Here’s a video:
More photos are available on flickr: mine, yours.
See you next time!
If we were to get a ton ($250,000) of money via grants and donations to support the community, what should we do with it?
How many of us have made recombinant DNA?
Are there more artists here than engineers?
If you are interested in the answers, drop by diybio.org/survey and contribute your responses. Anonymized, aggregate data will be published on May 1. The survey should only take 5-10 minutes.
Give it a shot!
Cheers,
Mac
p.s., if you are the kind of person who likes to be rewarded for doing surveys, email survey@diybio.org after you finish it and we’ll see about getting you a prize (free primer synthesis, or reagents, or artwork, or something like that).
p.p.s. interested in fundraising? email survey@diybio.org
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