Man-Made Horrors: October 2024

November 28, 2024

Man-Made Horrors for Your Pleasure!

We’ve been working hard in the background over the past year to set up an online store and the infrastructure needed to ship packages reliably across the world. We’ve stepped up our game in terms of merch designs and we’re thrilled by the reception from the community. But, we have grander ambitions for the store than just selling merch, we want to bring substance to the style! As you’ve all probably seen in our latest video, we’ve added lab equipment to the store, ok it’s a tube rack, but we want to expand our offering to bio supplies and kits.

This is where you all come in to help! We need to know what the people want! If you’re interested in lab supplies, educational kits, starter sets or specific DNA constructs featured on the channel let us know by filling out the poll in the link below.

Fill in the Poll

If you think some people in your life; researchers, bio hackers, students, budding scientists young and old, would like such a bio supply store feel free to forward them this email so we can hear from them too!

Also, starting from next month, expect the newsletter to come out on the first Monday of the month rather than the first, the discounts have been extended accordingly.

From the Cutting Room Floor

In our hologram projection video, we explored diffractive pattern projection which allowed us to use a standard film camera to create diffractive masks which looked nothing like the projected image. We explained in the video how by using a laser, we can ensure that the projection is crisp and precise as light waves are deviated proportionally to their wavelengths.

It’s an entertaining trick and definitely something we recommend people try at home, but other than being pretty it has some amazing uses in advanced chip manufacturing. Photolithography, literally ‘light stone carving’ is a manufacturing method used to make computer chips. A UV laser shown through a mask of a desired shape onto a photoresist coated silicon wafer. Whether it be a positive or negative resist, which is respectively removed or bonded to the substrate via the UV light exposure, the pattern is transferred. Further chemical etchings or coating processes can then take place to build the chip’s architecture. This pattern for a long time was focused using lenses onto the wafer to reduce its size, but as we reduce the size of the components to the same order of magnitude as the wavelength of the light we’re forced to contend with diffraction. As we saw in the video, diffraction is an edge effect that bends the light around a corner, thus diffusing the light below the threshold to affect the photoresist or affect it over too wide of an area.

To get anything smaller, we need to make use of this physical property of light. In the same way that the diffractive patterns on the films allowed us to project Batman symbols and various cartoons, a pattern can be calculated to project the appropriate amount of light at the correct locations. The following image links to a paper covering some of the math required for this trick.

In The Works

As many of you may have seen in our new short, we’ve been playing with the lab pet Jerry and have revamped our process for taking time-lapse footage. We’ve got a new enclosure with more lighting options and finer control of the camera’s focus. We’re hoping to have some really cool footage of other organisms as well that have incredible behaviours which we often miss because of their speed, or lack thereof.

The summer’s photography binge continues in other wavelengths as we’re not satisfied with only what our eyes can see normally, so we’re diving into higher energy forms of photography. On top of this we’re returning to the wifi camera project, where we plan on actually seeing more than just wifi emissions but being able to map returns of various emissions.

Of course we’re continuing the work on the Neuron project, we’ll be putting in an order for Neurons shortly to start testing stimulus responses, and verify which types of signals are most conducive to getting Neurons to fire reliably. Like we’ve mentioned before this project is by far the most costly on our docket and failures are rather painful so we are very careful with planning out the experiments. Last year we spent months developing our process to manufacture low cost Microelectrode arrays (MEA) that are biosafe for Neurons to grow on. The fact we managed to get comparable results to the commercial arrays was a huge milestone in this project. So for the next video, we feel the need to achieve another notable milestone, like actually playing a game! We know this project interests you folks the most, but for videos to be successful on Youtube we have to have something spectacular to share. We’ll be investigating how we can increase the amount of information we share about this project in different formats in the future.

Speaking of different formats, we’re working on setting up at least 1 other channel if not 2 for just this sort of thing. There we can share proofs of concepts, complete failures, cool side quests that just don’t fit in our main videos. When we start releasing content there, you guys will be the first to know!!

Neat Finds

Stem cell treatment for Diabetes?