Interactivos? Further Defined
We’re back… and after day 3 we’ve dove in and are about to get our hands wet collecting samples and to start generating bacterial cultures under Phd Microbiologist Brian Degger. It’s pretty amazing… Medialab Prado has actually set up a wet lab in the building- harvesting elements from an old toilet/ washroom- to help make all these projects possible.
Entitled Urban Forage Contaminant Assay, the goal of the project and the next 2 weeks (now week and a half) is to produce a bacterial based-luminance assay to test the food of urban foragers for the presence of heavy metals. We are interested in merging wild bacteria and electronics in a way that gives us an indication of the presence of heavy metals. We propose to do this by isolating luminous bacteria from seafood, this bacteria is sensitive to heavy metals,culturing the bacteria until glowing , and then with a control solution and an unknown solution of plant material(these are known to concentrate heavy metals) compare the luminosities of the solutions with an optical to electrical detector to be logged in an online.
To take a little peak into what we’re doing under Brian’s direction you can check out the Wiki. Nirvana and I are attempting to help as much as we can on the electronics side, and at the moment figuring out how to build a Fridge controlled by arduino for these little bacteria. Simultaneously we’re putting in our two sense about what we think the end result should be, of course we’re thinking of the user experience and the final product design.
Stay Tuned.
