Ever since I came across these fabulous science-themed baked goodies, I’ve wanted to bake some petri dish sugar cookies. I decided the perfect opportunity came when I was thinking about how to make a microbiology lecture interesting for my students. Why not bake examples of what they should expect with their bacterial conjugation experiments? Sounds like delicious idea to me!

The majority of my cookies were edible replicas of LB or blood agar plates with your basic bacterial streaks or streaks to single  colonies:

And here is a sample slide from my lecture – a baked depiction of some E. coli loving!

People in my lab also got a kick out of these cookies – they were all devoured within the same day!

I know it’s been a long while since I have last posted. So to make up for my absence, I want to share with you a few of my favorite science-themed crafts I have created in the past.

A DNA-adorned wreath depicting a virus infecting a bacterial cell:

A fun interpretation of the periodic table in the form of a postcard:

And finally, a nerdy piece of wall art inspired by the amino acids:

Hopefully that delighted the nerd in you all! There is certainly more to come! As a little preview, I plan to work on a cuff bracelet as inspired by this post. I’m not sure on the design yet, but the gorgeous embroidery work on Kootoyoo.com certainly reminded me of DNA!

Here is a much smaller scale craft I’ve done. These were made for a “Science/Math geek” swap on Craftster. There was one more small item that needed to go into the package so I decided to experiment with beads. Beads are small, right?

Hm beads are pretty but this was a science swap! How can beads be science-y? What looks like beads in science? Test tubes don’t look like beads….Bacteria doesn’t look like beads. Proteins don’t either (well in some cases they do). Hmmm.

Here is a list of the qualities beads must have:
1. A hole all the way through.

Though not round, pipet tips match the extensive qualifications of a bead (see above) and if worked right can look surprisingly elegant!
Behold: pipet tip earrings!

The top is a ready made earring finding. I added a bead at the top, then through the inside of the pipet tip a spiral of wire, lending visual interest to the cone and ending in another bead drop.

When in this setting, who would have imagined that these items can be so dangerous when shot off the end of a pipet at your fellow lab mate?

I mean, what? I’d never do such a thing. Here, look at these pretty earrings.

Both photos were taken by my wonderful swap partner known on Craftster as “whenfishfly”.

Check out this excerpt from the very awesome Science Friday podcast on NPR. Two authors who created graphic novels on natural selection and the mathematical language of logic talk about their work. I want to try and get my hands on the one about natural selection as I think it would be very interesting to see an artistic interpretation on this subject. Also I may be a little biased on the biology!

As mentioned last week, I went to see the opening of The Laboratory at Harvard’s Grand Opening . This included an exhibition of student work exploring the intersection between art and science and a showing of “datamatics 2.0″ by Ryoji Ikeda. I arrived too late to see much of the exhibition, but from what I could tell it was a little froofy and light on the science side. Interesting ideas, sure, but art+science? Hm.

Much more interesting was the video and audio composition (I hesitate to call it music) designed and composed by Ryoji Ikeda. It is very hard to describe the experience in words, but it was an interesting and stunning look at ways to visualize different sorts of mind-bogglingly huge data sets and was all tied together with audio motifs. The aesthetic was very harsh and mostly black and white, but when combined with the sound and precise on-screen movements, the stellar quality of the production was almost tangible. Included in the production was computer-generated imagery of hard drive errors, genes, protein structure, star positions, and likely other data sets that were completely abstract. Below are some stills of the video taken from the website. They probably don’t look that impressive when viewed out of context, but imagine them moving with strange digital sounds and also flashing.

Tonight I’m heading over to The Laboratory at Harvard to check out the grand opening and a film called “datamatics” by Ryoji Ikeda.

One aspect of this group will be the “artscience exhibition” described on their website as:

“Contemporary artists and designers increasingly create around cutting edges of science ranging from biology to the environment. The Artscience Exhibition program will invite leading contemporary artists and designers to develop works of art and design around science themes relevant to major science partners to THE LABORATORY including the Wyss Institute, the Harvard Initiative for Global Health (HIGH) and SEAS. These works, developed in partnership with the Paris-based art and design innovation center Le Laboratoire, will be exhibited in the lobby and hall areas and frame the context for public exhibition evenings, conferences, and interdisciplinary faculty discussions around issues that bridge the arts “

Updates to come!

DNA is the code of life. So many secrets are encoded into its simple four bases. Is it possible that if you found the right way to visualize this quintessential molecule that a secret message might appear? The face of Jesus?

To find out, I decided that the obvious solution to this pressing question was to make a quilt.

DNA has four bases, adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, represented by the letters a, t, c, g. These letters are just abstract representations of the real chemical structures of the bases, and not really great to look at when there are bunches in a row (like in actual DNA sequences). Example:

Informative, but not very nice to look at. Since the sequence is made up of only four letters, it is an easy task to convert each letter into a separate color. Additionally, there are two kinds of nucleotides—purines (adenine, guanine) and pyrimidines (thymine, cytosine). These groupings share similar chemical structures and so wouldn’t it be neat if the purines were the same color group and the pyrimidines a different one. And then wouldn’t it be neat if you could make a gene into a quilt??

Woah.

Here, each square represents a base pair and each triangle in the base represents one base within the pair. The colors represent bases as:

dark green = guanine,
light green = adenine,
dark blue= thymine,
light blue = cytosine

and this quilt shows the first 900 basepairs of the NADP gene of Agrobacterium vitis as shown in text above.

Now isn’t that nicer to look at?

So, a secret message didn’t appear, and neither did the face of jesus (whut), but it is interesting anyway to see what DNA looks like when represented by an alternate alphabet.

Quilting details:
The quilt fits a queen-sized bed. The squares are 2″ per side. And the quilting was done in this pattern:

See this box?

It houses the best chocolate bar out there. That’s right, Almond Joys. And not only does it house these mouth-watering treats, it was also constructed with a science twist.

The top is an abstraction of negative charges (in red) and positive charges (in green) coming together to close the box. All that was used was some card stock, an exacto, and a little bit of glue. That’s really all it takes to make some ionic joy!

Here is the debut post of the long-in-coming Precipitate This!, a blog about sciency-crafts. It was conceived one Cinco de Mayo in a flash of brilliance over enchiladas and margaritas that THIS is what the internet needs. A blog about the combination of crafting and art related to science. From tiny earrings made of pipet tips to wreaths showing the cycle of life to queen-sized quilts showing the sequence of a bacterial gene, the combination of craft, art, and science can come in any form. We mean to show that science is accessible to everyone, not just for those stuck in laboratories all day (the authors). We hope that you will be inspired, amused, amazed, and come away with some new ideas of your own. So get ready to Precipitate This!