Collaborate Disseminate
Doctors at the University of Pittsburgh are reporting a bizarre case of a woman who urinates alcohol. The medical mystery confounded scientists when the woman showed none of the other regular signs of excessive alcohol consumption, leading them to conc… Continue reading Unique bladder-brewery condition causes woman to pee alcohol
Trent Fehl is an engineer who has worked for such illustrious outfits as SpaceX and Waymo. When he got into baking, he brought those engineering skills home to solve a classic problem in the kitchen: keeping a sourdough starter within the ideal, somewhat oppressive range of acceptable temperatures needed for …read more
Continue reading Engineering Your Way to Better Sourdough (and Other Fermented Goods)
Join us on Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the open-source biology and biohacking Hack Chat!
Justin Atkin‘s name might not ring a bell, but you’ve probably seen his popular YouTube channel The Thought Emporium, devoted to regular doses of open source science. Justin’s interests span a wide range, literally from the heavens above to the microscopic world.
His current interest is to genetically modify yeast to produce spider silk, and to perhaps even use the yeast for brewing beer. He and the Thought Emporium team have been busy building out a complete DIY biology lab to support the effort, …read more
Continue reading Open-Source Biology and Biohacking Hack Chat
[Justin] from The Thought Emporium takes on a common molecular biology problem with these homebrew heating instruments for the DIY biology lab.
The action at the molecular biology bench boils down to a few simple tasks: suck stuff, spit stuff, cool stuff, and heat stuff. Pipettes take care of the sucking and spitting, while ice buckets and refrigerators do the cooling. The heating, however, can be problematic; vessels of various sizes need to be accommodated at different, carefully controlled temperatures. It’s not uncommon to see dozens of different incubators, heat blocks, heat plates, and even walk-in environmental chambers in the …read more
Continue reading Hacked Heating Instruments for the DIY Biology Lab
Many people who read Hackaday hold the title of “Webmaster” but [The Thought Emporium] is after slightly different credentials with the same title. He aims to modify a strain of yeast to produce spider silk. Charlotte’s Web didn’t go into great detail about the different types of silk that a spider can produce, but the video and screencap after the break give a rundown of how spiders make different types of silk, and that each species of spider makes a unique silk. For this experiment, the desired silk is “beta sheets” which the video explains are hard and strong.
Some …read more
Continue reading Arachnid Ale Uses Yeast to Make Spider Silk
For the last 20 million years, the species of yeast used to brew beer has had 16 chromosomes. Now scientists have created a new species with just one. Continue reading Chinese Scientists Used CRISPR to Make a New Species With ‘One Giant Chromosome’
Those of you who’ve never had a real sourdough have never had real bread. Good food fights back a little when you eat it, and a proper sourdough, with its crispy crust and tangy center, certainly fits the bill. Sourdough aficionados, your humble writer included, all have recipes that we pretend are ancient family secrets while in reality we’re all just guessing. Sourdough is partly science, partly art, but mostly delicious black magic.
In an effort to demystify his sourdough process, [Justin Lam] has gone digital with this image processing sourdough starter monitor. Sourdough breads are leavened not by the …read more
Continue reading Raspberry Pi Tracks Starter Fermentation For Optimized Sourdough
We will be the first to admit, we like to use Git for a lot of things that are probably off the beaten path. But now thanks to [hendricius] you can find out how to make your own bread on GitHub. Let’s get one thing straight. This isn’t the breadmaker fad from a while back, although we are surprised we don’t see more hacked together breadmakers with Internet connectivity. This is old-fashioned bread baking with a bowl, some ingredients, and an oven or another heat source.
You might think this is just using Git as a repository for recipes, but …read more
Continue reading Breadboarding: Git for A/B Testing Actual Bread
“We are planning to try to get our yeast to the International Space Station in next couple of years.” Continue reading Yeast Can Be Engineered to Turn Astronaut Pee Into Spaceflight Materials
Understanding how thousands of individual yeast genes interact in pairs could expose the underlying genetic bases of human diseases. Continue reading It Took 15 Years to Map Every Gene Interaction in a Yeast Cell