Living Photos Use Bacteria as Pixels

BrainBlogger writes "Scientists at UC San Francisco have engineered bacteria to create living photographs that weigh in at 100 megapixels per square inch. The photos were created by projecting light on "biological film" -- billions of genetically engineered E. coli growing in dishes of agar."

New Scientist

[alanw]

Plenty of bandwidth over at New Scientist [newscientist.com]

Complete with a photo of His Noodly Holiness.

webcast of the lecture is here!

[dokebi]

He gave a talk at the Synthetic Biology seminar at UC Berkeley two weeks ago. The web cast is located here:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?se riesid=1906978261 [berkeley.edu]
It's titled "Programming Dynamic Function into Bacteria"

Ben Sullivan

[SuperBanana]

Ben Sullivan is a busy blogger bee and socialite (that photo was taken rather close by to the Price Street address- at King King, on Hollywood Boulevard.)

Seems to also be involved in scienceblog.com, among other things. Which has the exact same address in whois- 4404-1/2 Price Street (sorry- first comment, I omitted the "1/2" by mistake.) Scienceblog.com also happens to feature the same story. He's pretty cheap about hosting, too- flickr seems to host a lot of the images he uses on his blog entries.

DNS servers for that domain are ns1/ns2.themachineworks.com, and it has an address in France: 7 impasse toufixe de la mort, F-75025, Paris. Kind of a dead end there for me.

Visiting www.themachineworks.com, there is what appears to be a generic hosting help page. Click through one, and you can see that the page was last modified by "h-68-164-115-163.lsanca54.dynamic.covad.net". "lsanca" looks like "Los Angeles, CA", and a traceroute confirmed it- one of the last hops was through a router with a hostname containing "losangeles1".

Call me crazy, but why is an "internet marketing specialist" working with Mr. Sullivan? And what is with the super-ritzy address? Hmmmmm.

Interesting.

[jd]

For images that are essentially monochromatic, this is fine. Actually, a Russian photographer did some ingenious colour photography [loc.gov] using monochrome film, but that was sensitive to all frequencies not just one.

Re:Original link please

[spage]

The lab's home page is http://www.voigtlab.ucsf.edu/ [ucsf.edu] , but they don't have a news item for this yet. The work seems to be Engineering E. coli to see light and will be in Nature according to their Papers section.

The most recent presentation slides [ucsf.edu] (PDF) are a hoot, that talk must have been fun.

Go UCSF!

More interesting information

[SuperBanana]

Previously mentioned sites: www.scienceblog.com www.bensullivan.com www.themachineworks.com.

Guess what? Scienceblog and themachineworks are both hosted out of an EV1servers hosting facility in Houston, Texas. They're so close to each other, they share the second-to-last router in a traceroute.

Second- brainblog and bensullivan.com are hosted from exactly the same server (or behind the same firewall) at theplanet.com. Again- in Houston. Ben Sullivan seems awfully cozy with Mounir Elabridi.

BBC radio story

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard about this just over an hour ago on the BBC's radio 4:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/frontiers.shtm l [bbc.co.uk]

real audio stream of the program, until it gets replaced in a weeks time by the next program:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/frontiers .ram [bbc.co.uk]

It talks about various projects around the topic of engineering microorganisms. Light-sensitive engineered E. Coli, "bacterial photography" starts around 8 minutes in if you want to fastforward...