Welcome to the latest installment of my bi-weekly newsletter, covering some of my favorite new developments in the fields of biotech, data science, engineering, and more. If this is your first issue, it's great to have you! For everyone else, thanks for coming back!
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Notes
We’re back with another mathematical font from Erik Demaine. This one’s called Tangle.
Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication
🗺 I'm sure many people would say the smartphone is the heir to the traditional paper map, but I'd make an argument that it's actually this GPS-enabled e-ink display. While a smartphone *might* be able to give you a rough sense of your location without a wifi or cellular data signal, this device is designed to give you your location and nothing else, regardless of the circumstances. It may just be a fun Hackaday project, but I do think it's a great example of a high-tech device that's more purpose-built than our jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none smartphones.
🧱 Mecabricks brings the simplicity of TinkerCAD to the world of LEGO. My only complaint? It'd be nice to have a proper "brick clicking" mechanism for attachment, but maybe that's in the works.
🎁📦 Level up your gift-giving game with the vast and thorough paper-folding guides at Templatemaker (which is maybe something I've shared here in the past? I can't quite remember)
Software and Programming
💻💭🎞🎬 Can you guess what movie these AI-imagined movie posters are advertising?
👁 This website will change itself slightly every time you blink. (Obviously, this requires camera access, so if you don't want to do that, nothing will change.)
🚗🛣 Maybe if we let this AI design the next Grand Theft Auto it'll be released more quickly?
🎂🍰 These AI-generated cakes are pretty disturbing, but I also think they could trigger a "life imitating art" moment as bakers try to replicate them in the physical realm.
🔊🌱🌳 From the maker of F*** Off Youtube comes a 31-second Spotify song that helps fight deforestation.
Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine
💧 Here's a fun particle fluidics simulator for you to play with.
🐚 I'm always interested by the applications 3D printing has found in the field of paleontology. This study on how the shells of ancient sea creatures may have determined the way they got around struck me as particularly creative.
👁🔵 It turns out we're not very good at detecting the color blue - really bad at it, in fact, as the examples in this article show.
Mapping, History, and Data Science
🌐 The Seismic Explorer is a reminder that earthquakes happen quite frequently.
🎶🎨 Colorify analyzes the color of your Spotify account, specifically the colors from the album art of your favorite songs. As you might expect, there's definitely alignment between genres and common color motifs, but I'm curious to see how these colors map to something more "quantitative" such as the colors most frequently visualized by synesthetes in response to tones.
💾📏 If you saved all of your data on to floppy disks, how much storage would you need?
Events and Opportunities
We’ve got a decent collection of events here once again, and with a smattering of in-person opportunities!
Tuesday, 9/21 New York Bio Pharma Networking Group Networking Event. For their next networking event, the NYBPNG is teaming up with Rutgers iJOBS for a virtual meeting that brings together biotech professionals, students, and researchers from across the NJ and NY life science communities.
Thursday, 9/23 NY Hardware Startup Meetup. After a short hiatus during the dog days of summer, NYC's nexus of hardware entrepreneurs is back with some great new demos and discussions.
Thursday, 9/23 3D Bioprinting for Food. If you can print cells, tissues, and organoids, you're also well-positioned to print foods like meat, mushrooms, and more. For 3DHEALS' next webinar event, a panel of researchers, entrepreneurs, and technologists will come together to discuss the current state of food bioprinting efforts, current challenges, and how we're getting from printer to plate.
Friday, 9/24 Drunk Science Presents: Primates. It's half science seminar, half comedy drinking game when the Drunk Science reconvenes for their next event on the science of primates. Come watch as three comedians compete to present the best scientific dissertation to a panel of real scientists.
Sunday, 9/26 SciArt Synapse Virtual Mixer. Join the SciArt group for a casual afternoon of cross-disciplinary networking and conversation to mix, mingle, and chat with professionals in the arts, sciences & technology sectors. Bring a drink, set yourself up with your favorite Zoom background and enjoy an afternoon of meeting artists, scientists, technologists, and cross-disciplinary practitioners. The event will include a few organized rounds of blind networking in breakout rooms and then some longer sessions on chosen topics.
Thursday & Friday, 10/14-15 A Better Tech-a-Thon. Hackathons are often the jumping-off point for lots of impressive technology innovations, but tech innovation doesn't always provide the same benefits to everyone - sometimes even leaving groups of people behind. As a bit of a counterweight to this current tech industry trajectory, the two-day A Better Tech-a-thon event will be an opportunity for talented students and leading researchers to collaboratively apply their skills to innovate on a wide range of active tech-for-good projects, sourced from the Code for America Brigade Network and DemocracyLab.
Monday-Friday, 11/1-5 Founder-Led Biotech Summit. With some of today's most innovative and exciting biotech companies being led by their scientist founders, our friends over at Pillar VC and the Petri biotech accelerator believe this trend isn't the exception, but rather the emergence of the new biotech industry. With these companies blazing the trail for the next generation, Pillar and Petri are hosting this free virtual summit that brings together leaders from around the globe to drive this movement.
Map of the Month
These are the average colors of the world.
Odds & Ends
♟Can I interest you in a game of 1-D chess?
🍞🧈 Or, if chess isn't really your speed, how about Toast Simulator?