Re: [DIYbio] Help needed: BBC Documentary in need of guidance

Hi Sam,

Bubbly-audibles are doable, but not without some slight of hand. For
example, yeast will carbonate the water where you grow it if you keep it
under pressure, that's how you get a head on beer or bubbles in
traditional ginger ales. If you get the formulation right (ask a
chemist, not I!) you can probably select for larger bubbles, and I
imagine surface tension plays a role in the noise of the emerging
bubbles (but you'll still need a good mic!).

Radiation is *easy*, but only in the visual spectrum. You're not going
to get any radiation of high enough energy to make a geiger counter
click! Although I can imagine a few far-future possibilities, it doesn't
look physically possible with what we now know/have to make
higher-than-'indigo' light with Synbio. However, (again with the slight
of hand), a geiger counter is really just a luminometer for
high-frequency light (X-Rays/Gamma-Rays), right? So make a low-frequency
one; use a photodiode and a dark-box, and you could probably tune things
to give you a click-click-click style output like a geiger counter.

You'll note that, for flashy mediagenic stuff, both of my above
solutions are inorganic! Sorry. Synbio is better at producing cheap
medicines for global disease, for feeding us, for clothing us, for
changing the world in ways obvious or subtle, but it's not great at
producing audibly flashy stuff for radio. :)

On 29/04/15 13:01, Sam Francis wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The other night I attended the biohacking lab at the London hackspace
> and a few of you recommended I put my requests to the collective
> hivemind on here.
>
> I'm a producer for a BBC Radio 4 Specials in the UK and we're doing a
> documentary on synthetic biology for our Futureproofing series
> (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hyy1p
> <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hyy1p>). To help give a good idea
> the ease and the limitations of doing synthetic biology with DIY lab
> equipment we want to get our two reporters to begin the show with an
> experiment, which we will then use as a strand to tie the whole story
> together.
>
> As such could any of you suggest an experiment that shows off the
> potential of the technology that two journalists un-trained in biology
> and largely ignorant could do with minimum supervision?
>
> We have a few requirements:
>
> 1. the ideal would be something that works on radio - perhaps bacteria
> that produces a gas/bubbles that we could then record popping,
> or produces radiation that can then be picked up on a Geiger
> counter, which we can in turn record beeping and whatnot - though
> this is not vital
> 2. we must be able to start and complete the experiment in two weeks
> 3. the experiment can be carried out using only basic kit or
> the equipment at the London hackspace
> (https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Group:Biohacking )
> 4. it must be interesting enough to capture the imagination of the
> outside world
>
> Any ideas, musings or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Sam
>
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