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Living Photos Use Bacteria as Pixels
BrainBlogger writes "Scientists at UC San Francisco have engineered bacteria to create living photographs that weigh in at 100 megapixels per square inch. The photos were created by projecting light on "biological film" -- billions of genetically engineered E. coli growing in dishes of agar."
Obligatory Coral Cache Link
Pretty detailed tiny image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How many noodly appendage comments will we see?
With the growing number of sequenced microbes, we can search through nature's large trove of tools to find ones that fit the job," Levskaya said. "In our case, searching for light-sensing domains led us to use a photosynthetic bacterium." The students produced ghostlike, living photos of many things, including themselves and their advisors
I wonder how far they are from being able to take a huge image of a processor chip pathway and use these microbes to lay out an eating path for another microbe to create cheaper chips. I'm guessing it isn't realistic in the near future, but as the progression builds towards more "consistent" bacteria, maybe we'll see more aggressive use of these discoveries for profitable reasons.
That's my biggest question -- is anyone seeing private R&D scientists investing time and money in engineered bacteria that will be protected by patents or other IP protections? It's pretty amazing that TFA's discovery was by students.
Living Photos Use Bacteria as Pixels ...
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
---
Can't see nothing with those bacteria sized pixels!
You can't handle the truth.
That bacteria has every much of a right to life as you! Boycott anti-bacteria soap and walking!
Who do some people think they are--the pinnacle of creation, or something?
So that's what an intelligently designed life-form looks like.
Who wants to be the first to flip through my E.coli scrapbook?
To wash your hands and don't touch your face after using your camera.
Sola Deo Gloria!
Obviously they got all the germs from donated used keyboards...Dirty keyboard cause infections in hospitals
fak3r.com
Great, now you can get Montezuma's Revenge from a photo.
so now there is a new kind of dirty picture. The internet will thrive!
... themselves, or someone who hasn't washed recently could end up with "idiot" written on their forehead.
What I'd really like to see is for them to take a picture of billions of genetically engineered E. coli bacteria in a petridish of agar. Yes, that sure will be cool to see.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Do you get your money back if the image starts to get blurry or stretch apart? What if it dies?
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
...my child gets a hold of the negatives and eats them? E. coli poisoning!? No thank you!
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
Now photos can be as healthy for you as a Jack in the Box hamburger.
I don't think the hamburgers react to light though... or anything else...
I have seen His Holiness himself! Bacteria in the form of Him?!? This most certainly is the work of Thy Holiness! How else could this be possible? Most certainly His own work. These students have been Touched by his Noodely Appendage! (faints)
That picture of you will really grow on someone!
Watch as the eyes of the picture really do follow you around the room!
E. Coli never looked so beautiful!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Baskin Robbins had that years ago with their photo cakes.
That photo sure grows on you doesn't it?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
is a picture of George Wendt eating E. coli bacteria from a petridish in a movie.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I for one welcome our new photogenic masters.
E. Coli genetic engineering has been around for many years. Creating light sensitive strains, strains that make pigments, etc. is roughly appropriate for college level biology. I suppose it's kind of neat that engineers have taken notice, but it really is textbook stuff.
In fact, even more simply, since the pigment was present/absent based on whether the bacteria were growing in the light, you can repeat this experiment at home: use any organism using chlorophyll for photosynthesis and grow it in patterned light: you'll get a "photograph" in green/yellow. That's an experiment even elementary school students do.
You've got to give it to these people, though: they are excellent salespeople. Getting away with such trivialities as "engineering" and endowing bacteria with "new skills" takes both guts and skills.
Uh, why don't you get back to me when you can engineer bacteria that respond differently to different wavelengths of light, e.g. change to the same color as the light striking them. THEN I'll get excited!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Complete with a photo of His Noodly Holiness.
That's pretty shitty.
Third google hit on Mr. Elabridi's name is:
"Maroc Internet - Management Mounir Elabridi, a globally recognized innovator in Internet marketing, founded Maroc Internet in 2002. Mr Elabridi brings to this venture a proven track ...
Well, now how about that.
The domain name servers for the domain are NS1/NS2.BENSULLIVAN.COM. Mr. Sullivan lives at 4404 Price St, Los Angeles, CA 90027- about a 15 minute drive from University California Los Angeles. It's a stretch, but also an interesting coincidence.
Please help metamoderate.
In A.D. 1, Christianity was beginning...
Roman Commander: What Happen?
Centurion: Somebody set up us the cross.
Centurion: We get new religion.
Roman Commander: What!
Roman Commander: It's Jesus!
JC: How are you children?
JC: All your cross are belong to Jesus.
JC: You are on your way to political upheaval.
Roman Commander: What you say?
JC: You have no chance to survive make your Empirical Dominion.
JC: Ha Ha Ha Ha...
Centurion: Commander!
Roman Commander: Move Executions!
Roman Commander: For Great Rome!
new meaning to the term live porn.
How am I supposed to believe this is real if there is a pic of the flying speghetti monster in the corner (FSM). Looks like slashdot got duped by a joke article again...
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
I initially read the post as -- billions of genetically engineered E. coli growing in dishes of anger , and I couldn't for the life of me imagine how the scientists were able to know that the E. Coli were angry. I thought maybe they were working together to form insulting pictures to project at the researchers, like goatse or something to that effect. E Coli with attitude: now that's news for nerds! :D
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
... billions of genetically engineered E. coli ...
Why would anyone want to buy a camera that has a warning label that the product is not only hazardous to your health but is also a biological agenet if exported outside of the USA? Should be a hot Christmas item for kiddies and terrorists.
So that's how those neat photographs of the Avian Flu virus were taken!
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
All this neat stuff we can do, and we *still* dismiss intelligent design as a possibility.
*chuckle* That's really interesting. Sad and funny, but interesting.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
The mid-1980s want their humour back.
I hear the pictures turned out like shit, though.
Do not eat iPic
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Exposure took 12-15 HOURS? What does that equate to as far as film speed? You're going to need to get that down quite a few orders of magnitude to be useful for imaging anything.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
He gave a talk at the Synthetic Biology seminar at UC Berkeley two weeks ago. The web cast is located here:e riesid=1906978261
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?s
It's titled "Programming Dynamic Function into Bacteria"
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
In the 60s or 70s someone did something similar using photosynthesis on regular leaves. The bacteria are probably better (finer grained and faster).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
100 megapixels per square inch with bacteria?
By the same logic, a photograph developed from a negative has as many pixels as molecules on the surface of the paper. Anyone care to calculate that resolution?
if only that stuff in my bathroom could do this...
Now I gotta worry about getting DISEASES like e-Coli from my PORN ?!?!
Seems to also be involved in scienceblog.com, among other things. Which has the exact same address in whois- 4404-1/2 Price Street (sorry- first comment, I omitted the "1/2" by mistake.) Scienceblog.com also happens to feature the same story. He's pretty cheap about hosting, too- flickr seems to host a lot of the images he uses on his blog entries.
DNS servers for that domain are ns1/ns2.themachineworks.com, and it has an address in France: 7 impasse toufixe de la mort, F-75025, Paris. Kind of a dead end there for me.
Visiting www.themachineworks.com, there is what appears to be a generic hosting help page. Click through one, and you can see that the page was last modified by "h-68-164-115-163.lsanca54.dynamic.covad.net". "lsanca" looks like "Los Angeles, CA", and a traceroute confirmed it- one of the last hops was through a router with a hostname containing "losangeles1".
Call me crazy, but why is an "internet marketing specialist" working with Mr. Sullivan? And what is with the super-ritzy address? Hmmmmm.
Please help metamoderate.
"Mooooom, the picture of Billy is eating Billy."
I thought goatse.cx was bad, but these new photos really make me sick! (rimshot, please) Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the veal and don't forget to tip your waiters.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
This technology has been used for many years by the the wizards.
y +potter
I recall Harry Potter seeing many of these pictures.
If I recall correctly there were some pictures that even came with candy, these had this "ancient" technology, that's why those pics moved only once... they used bacteria, and bacteria like all life forms have only one life to live. The pictures at Hogwarts walls used more modern technology, where bacteria would reproduce, hence making the pictures live forever.
http://www.google.es/search?q=living+picture+harr
Where I can I find the original story? This is interesting to me, but I'd rather not be maniupulated into driving traffic to some blog site like Mr. Roland Piquepaille likes to do (haven't seen any of his posts in a while, thank goodness). Not trying to troll here.
AAAAAaaaaaTTTTCHHHHHHHHHHHOOOO
Hey, my 24 exposure roll of 35mm film just became 26 exposures!!
AT&ROFLMAO
Maybe now there will finally be pornographic images of high enough resolution to meet my refined tastes.
For images that are essentially monochromatic, this is fine. Actually, a Russian photographer did some ingenious colour photography using monochrome film, but that was sensitive to all frequencies not just one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wonder when will scratch-n-sniff stickers begin using this technology?
Scientists have announced that they have managed to create a gigapixel per square inch "light sensor" using only silver halide molecules coated onto a transparent plastic substrate. On exposure to light, some molecules change state by dissociating into pure silver. Exposure times of just a few milliseconds were all that were needed. This image is not visible to the naked eye, but can be "developed" using chemical processing to amplify the image to make it visible. The final image can be then fixed and rendered no longer light sensitive by bleaching out the remaining halides. The image is then rendered permanent. With its vastly higher resolution than ordinary digital CCD sensors, scientists are hailing the discovery as a breakthrough for creating ultra-high resolution images. They have also speculated that by creating a sandwich of light sensitive layers and colour filters, colour images could be recorded by the same process. The only question is, is the usual digital imaging that we have all grown used to doomed by this new process?
Interestingly, the idea of using microbes to create an image is not new. Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club by virtue of paintings he made by growing different colored bacteria. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
Where did I park my Zodiac?
You can't take the sky from me...
Previously mentioned sites: www.scienceblog.com www.bensullivan.com www.themachineworks.com.
Guess what? Scienceblog and themachineworks are both hosted out of an EV1servers hosting facility in Houston, Texas. They're so close to each other, they share the second-to-last router in a traceroute.
Second- brainblog and bensullivan.com are hosted from exactly the same server (or behind the same firewall) at theplanet.com. Again- in Houston. Ben Sullivan seems awfully cozy with Mounir Elabridi.
Please help metamoderate.
Megabytes per inch.
I heard about this just over an hour ago on the BBC's radio 4:m l
s .ram
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/frontiers.sht
real audio stream of the program, until it gets replaced in a weeks time by the next program:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/frontier
It talks about various projects around the topic of engineering microorganisms. Light-sensitive engineered E. Coli, "bacterial photography" starts around 8 minutes in if you want to fastforward...
The photosensitive E.coli were just one of several entries in last year's Intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, which is an annual synthetic biology contest that takes place over the summer at participating institutions. With the help of a few professors and TAs, small teams of students propose, design, and "implement" actual genetically modified organisms.
Check out this week's Nature as well as the iGEM wiki for more information about synthetic biology and iGEM, respectively. Biology is definitely getting more and more interesting for engineering-minded students.
I highly recommend taking some biology, bioinformatics, or biotechnology classes if you are an undergraduate in CS/EE... exciting times, especially compared to the regular "IT" universe.
"Hey! I made one too, out of penicillin!"
"Dude, it's eating my e. coli photograph! C'mon man... all that time wasted."
"Weird, it looks like the Virgin Mary now..."
VIRGIN MARY E. COLI PHOTOGRAPH - NO RESERVE - FREE SHIPPING
hi mom!
Honestly, after a joke that bad, ducking isn't enough. You should be diving into a bomb shelter.
Read the slides (PDF), they acknowledge photosynthesis. Yes, it's just college students engineering new functionality as part of a competition, but that itself is pretty cool. I didn't know there is already a registry of standard biological parts for this sort of hacking. They add photosensitivity to the bacterium membrane, add pigmentation change, and hook them up.
The same UCSF lab is also working on an AND gate to combine two sensors, which gets us closer to bacteria delivering lethal payloads to tumors.
=S
E. Coli? That means shitty pictures?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Great... So now not only do they want to kills us, but they know what we look like.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
"All this neat stuff we can do, and we *still* dismiss intelligent design as a possibility.
*chuckle* That's really interesting. Sad and funny, but interesting."
I'll bite.
This particular "neat stuff" was creating using the principles and techniques of contemporary genetic science, which in turn wouldn't be possible without a solid foundation in the theory of evolution.
Let's put that another way: much of biology, including the manipulation of tiny bacterial genes, no longer makes any sense and wouldn't be possible if you replace evolution with the Book of Genesis. Which is also exactly why evolution is so widely accepted by legitimate biologists: it predicts stuff (like the existence of DNA, for example)! And lo and behold, we continually find that those predictions were right! And then we make funny pictures using genetically-engineered phototropic E. Coli!
Imagine if someone tried to convince you that, instead of a CPU, Gordon Moore himself was inside your computer doing math with a slide rule. Even if your computer was glued shut, might you reasonably dismiss Gordon Mooreism as a possibility, given everything else you know about computers? Given what you're capable of doing with a computer right now?
That, Chuckles, is why people dismiss "Intelligent Design."
At any rate, are you really philosophically prepared to argue that, if Man can do it, so can God? To me, that always sounds like a great way to diminish your creator. Unless you really want us to think of God as a grad student at UCSF?
...I feel as if a million eyes are watching me, silently...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
So, what is the weight of 1 square inch bacteria? Do you use fluid ounces, solid ounces, UK, US or tombstones? There is something sick here and it is not the E. coli.
New Science classes in Kansas schools use a new unit for the smell of bacteria. It is measured in cpf (cheese per foot).
Great. Now you can actually get infected with something just by looking at porn.
What's this world coming to.
It would be so cool to have images that we could zoom into like they do in the movies, where they might have a picture of a street scene, then 'computer enhance' so they can zoom into a single window in a single building, then zoom throught that to indentify the face of the occupant. Of course that's just si fi because we are lucky to get much more than 2X enlargement before the resolution becomes too poor to see much more.
I think the "breakthrough for creating ultra-high resolution images" you speak of would come down to the capabilities of lenses, which have various limitations. It would be interesting to know, though, what the theoretical limits of resolution are.
...touched by His Noodly Goodness
Amen. Pass the Alfredo.
s'wut i sed.
The photos were created by projecting light on "biological film" -- billions of genetically engineered E. coli growing in dishes of agar."
"Please keep out of reach of children's mouths. In fact, your's too."
smile...
keep smiling...
*15 mins later*
keep smiling....
*half an hour later*
keep smiling...DON'T MOVE!
*3 hours later*
keep smiling...I SAID DON'T MOVE. I DON'T CARE IF YOU'VE GOT CRAMPS!!
*8 hours later*
hey! we need your eyes open! you can't fall asleep! and SMILE!
*12 to 15 hours later*
there! all done! Your living photograph is ready.
Now let's start on the family portrait now that you've had some practice.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
OMG! I can't believe it. First we get viruses by e-mail and now you're telling me I can get a bacterial infection from from looking at naughty pictures?
I guess the photos are very...(ahem)...life-like?
(ducking for cover)
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Bacteria makes pictures of YOU!!!
After Thanksgiving i will produce enough E-coli to paint the FSM's Sistine Chapel.
Thank you Mr photographer for pointing out the obvious..... The trouble with geeks (myself included)is that we sometimes forget that "new technology" is not always better, or even new.....
You didn't see the "Funny" mod, did you...?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
That's absolutely incredible that they can do it, but how long would these pictures last? Seems like they wouldn't last very long.
In renowned polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem's 1981 book "Imaginary magnitude" there is a short story about this exact subject.
That's only a factor of "several" better resolution than you routinely get from film.
Work it out - a 35mm negative (remember those?) is also about a square inch and is on the order of 10 million pixels. That's for off-the shelf film being processed off-the-shelf, then put into a routine scanning system. If you use high-resolution film, hypered and cold-processed, possibly in a medium format camera, you'll be pushing 100 Mpx. And then you could go up to the cutting edge of photographic technology and look at half-plate or full-plate negatives (that's emulsion spread onto sheets of glass before being put into the camera) and you'd be far over 100 Mpx.
Digital technology is approaching the capabilities of film technology, but it's not there yet. Everyone knows that digital will eventually overtake film (look at when Kodak started to push technologies like PhotoCD as an image format), but it's still not routinely beating film. Maybe another 2 years.
(Note that the scanned images you get with your film for the price of a beer are generally not very good quality. Then again, the quality of standard processing seems to be going down as well because people are getting used to not being able to enlarge their images to the equivalent of 3x5 metres wide. Did you never wonder why your enlarger's head could be tilted to point horizontally across the darkroom?)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I saw the 'funny' mod - thought it must be an error. I just didn't get it, even though I understand the principles of photography. I guess his dead pan delivery was just too much for my limited intelligence.
100 line pairs per mm for Kodak Technical Pan is clearly a practical limitation, but it still would be interesting to know though, what the theoretical limits of resolution are. Perhaps you could supply that.
Hail them.
Saw it linked on www.venganza.org
I for one welcome our bacterial picture creating overlords
Better is the enemy of good enough. - Russian proverb.
300lpm. Not official from Kodak, they don't have the specs up in the info. Shame they discontinued it, I shot a few rolls in B&W class...it's absolutely ridiculous stuff, slow as all getout (ISO25) and tricky to develop properly, but 11x14 prints from a 35mm negative have _less_ grain than a contact sheet of Delta 100 negatives when you compare them under a loupe. B&H still carries 8x10 sheets of the stuff, I'd love to see a landscape shot on that. If you're into film and you know what you're doing, I strongly suggest getting what you can find while it's still available.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
This revolutionary new chemical process, in addition to providing much higher resolution, also allows for a much greater exposure latitude than current state-of-the-art digital sensors, allowing for much greater levels of both highlight ans shadow details in high-contrast images. And this color process of which you speak should record much more accurately and vividly. All in all, I agree this breakthrough technology looks to be far superior to the current pitiful CCDs we are all used to. Perhaps a bit more inconvenient, but the results will far outweigh the drawbacks.
(disclaimer: I have both a state-of-the-digital art Nikon D70, and a 30+-year old Nikkormat EL. I use them both a lot. Oh, but the older lenses put anything Nikon makes nowadays to shame...300mm Nikkor-H telephoto is a work of art. Anyway, I'm babbling.)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley