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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!
If you like this email, forward it to a friend (I can't encourage this enough) and if you're seeing it for the first time, subscribe here to get it regularly. As always, if you come across something cool you'd like to share, send me a note.
Notes
I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe it’s only been two weeks since I sent out the last edition of this newsletter — it feels more like it’s been a month or so. It’s likely that’s because so many exciting projects and programs I’m involved in have finally launched over the past two weeks.
To begin with, I and a bunch of my colleagues from the GRO-Biotech leadership have officially launched the inaugural Nucleate bio-entrepreneurship program for the NYC area. With my tenure in the GRO organization (very) slowly coming to a close, it’s been great to see off one more great program to help advance our mission of connecting the strong intellectual capital of New York's top graduate research institutions with the growing life sciences community in the tri-state area.
Second, it has long been known to basically all of the readers of this newsletter that I had a pretty elaborate workshop and fabrication lab in my apartment. Well, that in-house setup is no more. In collaboration with my friend, former colleague, and Sinai BioDesign alum Jake Wolf, we have combined our skills, spaces, and prototyping resources into WolfCo Design, an East Harlem-based design studio and fee-for-service fabricator. With all the 3D printers, laser cutters, and water jets you’ve known and loved — plus lots of new tools and toys — it’s our aim to provide services for a larger audience of artists, technologists, and small design firms within the Greater New York area.
None of this means I forgot about the font, though — it’s “Magnitude and Direction” in Morse Code via Encoded Messages.
Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication
🛏 In a world full of direct-to-consumer mattress brands that are hard to differentiate, maybe the best solution is just building your own.
⚡📡 We're a little closer to Nikola Tesla's vision of a world of wireless energy transmission.
👆 All you need is a projector, a camera, and some clever optics to turn just about anything into a touchscreen.
Software and Programming
💭🖼 Tweet at this bot to get an AI-powered interpretation of said person, place, thing, or idea.
In a rare M&D move, I'm going to use a meme to convey this next link:
📮 I'm still trying to figure out exactly how the USPS's Intelligent Mail barcode system works, but apparently you can hack it using things like the Postal Service's encoder/decoder to generate instructions that will get your mail sent to a place different that the one it's addressed to.
🎼🎶 Build the ultimate Symphony in Bb with this website.
🔎🖼 Here's 4 quick ways to make sure the images your posting to the group chat are real.
Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine
🔬 Sometimes, I have mixed feelings about DIY science - it's a more difficult task to "do your own research" than many people understand. This 1-hour DIY rapid COVID test, though, is an example of what good DIY science looks like, brought to you by former Genspace and Biotech Without Borders founder Ellen Jorgensen.
🟦🔺🟡 Some of the greatest minds in math and science were limited by the technologies of their time. One such person was Lord Kelvin, who proposed a unique geometric shape that couldn't easily be fabricated until the advent of computer-aided design and 3D printing.
Mapping, History, and Data Science
📰📈 What news is trending around the world right now, and how has it changed over time? (The site is definitely interesting, but I don't know how I feel about what its URL is implying.)
💰🌳 In New York (and a bunch of other cities) the more green you have, the more green you also tend to have.
📽🎞🎬 IMDb is a great resource for information about movies and TV shows, but what about the movies and TV shows within movies and TV shows?
🗳 Think you've got what it takes to redistrict your state? (Considering how much difficulty independent commissions are having creating balanced districts, it certainly looks like it.) DistrictBuilder is an open source mapping tool to let you try your hand at balancing your state's congressional districts.
Events and Opportunities
We’ve got a decent collection of events here once again, and with a smattering of in-person opportunities!
Thursday, 10/7 (+ 10/14, 10/21) Valley of Death Workshop Series. From the Design Technologies biotech accelerator team, this series of three workshops will look at some of the crucial early moments in a startup's life that can make or break their journey for years to come. Experienced panelists will weigh in with their experiences and advice over three weeks of workshops looking at employment agreements, conflicts of interest and technology licenses.
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
🏠 Here's where everyone in the US lives.
Odds & Ends
♨ Welcome to the Museum of Toasters.