Make A Topsy Turvey Planter From A Plastic Soda Bottle!

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Amida who writes at the wonderful blog, Journey Into Unschooling. Here she shows you a great way to re-use plastic soda bottles or juice cartons to create an upside-down tomato planter!

I’ve always been fascinated with growing tomatoes upside-down, but, $19.99 (which was what my local garden supply store was selling it for) seemed a bit steep to pay for what essentially is a bag you fill with dirt! So I decided to make our own using some very basic materials we had around the house.

Here’s what you’ll need:
* 2-liter bottle or juice carton
* Garbage bag
* Duct tape
* Tomato plant
* Utility knife
* Paper towel
* Cotton balls
* Twine

Step 1.

Using the knife, carefully cut off the bottom of your bottle or carton.

Step 2.

Roll up a garbage bag around your arm and insert into the bottle. Once inside, loosen the bag
and try to spread it evenly within the bottle. The reason I used the black bag was to keep the roots covered and hopefully warm in the sun.

Step 3.

Fold the top edge of the bag over the bottle and secure with duct tape.

Step 4.

Wrap a tomato plant with paper towel and carefully insert into the bottle and out through the spout. The towel will help keep the soil together.

Step 5.

Fill the rest of the bottle with soil.

Step 6.

Wrap some twine or string at the mouth of
the bottle, stretching along the length of
the body, and tape in place.

Step 7.

Stuff some cotton balls through the bottom opening to help keep water in.

Step 8.

Hang in a sunny spot and water thoroughly. Our plants have been growing strong for at least
three weeks now and appear to be doing well. Within the first week, the plant flipped around and started
growing upwards.

Another advantage I’ve noticed is that there that are no bugs on the plants! Perhaps in thisway, they will survive a little longer than our usual crop and maybe even provide us with some juicy tomatoes this summer.

Makers of Waag [society]

The ‘Makers Guild’ is a maker space at Waag that connects craftsmanship, digital personal fabrication and biotechnology. The Makers Guild re-introduced manual, labour intensive craftsmanship as a supplement to the digital fabrication practices of the Fablab. It researches traditional crafts and combines them with digital fabrication.

Go to this link to see all their video’s.

Biofabricate Platform – Material Innovator Series

BIOFABRICATE is a platform for biomaterial innovators and consumer brands growing a sustainable future.

Bloom Foam – Algix

BIOFABRICATE: Material Innovator Series, No. 1 ‘Bloom Foam’ from Biofabricate on Vimeo.

Ecovative

BIOFABRICATE: Material Innovator Series, No. 2 ‘Ecovative’ from Biofabricate on Vimeo.

AlgiKnit

BIOFABRICATE: Material Innovator Series, No. 3 ‘AlgiKnit’ from Biofabricate on Vimeo.

Biofabricate Platform – Creatives in Biotech Series

If you are a designer hoping for a career in biofabrication this is for you!

Over the next few weeks we’re hosting conversations with creatives working full-time in-house at biotech startups in the US and in Europe. Our goal? To provide you with insights into a career in biodesign and biofabrication.

Sign up to our newsletter for updates and use the box below to submit a burning question. We’ll present the most frequently asked ones to our guests.

View here the interviews for free

Make a DNA Cocktail from strawberries

DNA. It’s what encodes the genetic material of every living thing. And it also makes a yummy cocktail.

This video, which stars TED Fellow synthetic biologist Oliver Medvedik, shows you how to make a delicious adult beverage out of frozen strawberries, pineapple juice and Bacardi 151. Follow the adorably animated instructions, and you’ll be able to isolate the DNA of strawberries while making a shot. Throughout it all, Medvedik — who co-founded New York City’s community biolab GenSpace (see photos of their incredible office building) — shares the science of why he chose strawberries for this recipe and reveals exactly what each step does toward isolating DNA.

Some of you may be wondering: can you make a non-alcoholic version? Yes, says Medevik, but it would require using a substance like chloroform or phenol. Medevik explains, “It would have to be an organic solvent where the DNA is poorly soluble. Alcohols, such as isopropyl or ethanol, are good since they are fairly nontoxic, cheap and have the right chemical attributes.” Look, but don’t drink.

This video was shot by cinematographer Peter Olsen, directed and edited by TED’s own Kari Mullholland, sound designed by Arjun G Sheth and animated by Joy Buran, James Buran and Noelle Melody of Twins Are Weird. It was shot at GenSpace, where everyday citizens can learn about biotechnology.

Enjoy the video. And cheers! To tinkering with the stuff of life.

Andrew Pelling: This scientist makes ears out of apples

TED Fellow Andrew Pelling is a biohacker, and nature is his hardware. His favorite materials are the simplest ones (and oftentimes he finds them in the garbage). Building on the cellulose structure that gives an apple its shape, he “grows” lifelike human ears, pioneering a process that might someday be used to repair body parts safely and cheaply. And he has some even wilder ideas to share … “What I’m really curious about is if one day it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen,” he says.

Why you should listen

Scientist, professor, entrepreneur and TED Fellow Andrew Pelling has built a career on unapologetic curiosity, creativity and serendipity. He is a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa where he founded and directs a curiosity-driven research lab that brings together artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers. The lab uses low-cost, open source materials and methods to explore speculative living technologies of the future. He has created human body parts from plants and grown living skins on LEGOs — innovations with the potential to replace prohibitively expensive commercial biomaterials.

Pelling is cofounder and CSO of Spiderwort, a company developing innovative plant-derived biomaterials and medical devices for reconstructive surgery and regenerative medicine. He also founded pHacktory, a street-level research lab in Ottawa that amplifies community ideas through a potent mixture of craft, serendipity and curiosity.

Pelling’s work has been in the international media spotlight for many years and recognized in outlets such as Wired, Huffington Post, NPR, Scientific American, Popular Science, BBC, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle and others, as well as numerous highlights in the Canadian media and Scientific media. He was named a TED Fellow in 2016.

Ellen Jorgensen – What you need to know about CRISPR

Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, bringing scientific exploration and understanding to the public. Should we bring back the wooly mammoth? Or edit a human embryo? Or wipe out an entire species that we consider harmful? The genome-editing technology CRISPR has made extraordinary questions like these legitimate — but how does it work? Scientist and community lab advocate Ellen Jorgensen is on a mission to explain the myths and realities of CRISPR, hype-free, to the non-scientists among us.

Why you should listen

In 2009, after many years of working as a molecular biologist in the biotech industry, together with TED Fellow Oliver Medvedik, Jorgensen founded Genspace, a nonprofit community laboratory dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. Despite criticism that bioresearch should be left to the experts, the Brooklyn-based lab continues to thrive, providing educational outreach, cultural events and a platform for science innovation at the grassroots level. At the lab, amateur and professional scientists conduct award-winning research on projects as diverse as identifying microbes that live in Earth’s atmosphere and (Jorgensen’s own pet project) DNA-barcoding plants, to distinguish between species that look alike but may not be closely related evolutionarily. Fast Company magazine named Genspace one of the world’s “Top 10 innovative companies in education.”

What others say

“Ellen Jorgensen is helping to democratize biology—making it less the purview of academics and Big Pharma and more an enterprise accessible to anyone who wants a hands-on scientific experience.” — Discover Magazine, October 2011

Ellen Jorgensen – Biohacking, you can do it too

Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, bringing scientific exploration and understanding to the public. We have personal computing — why not personal biotech? That’s the question biologist Ellen Jorgensen and her colleagues asked themselves before opening Genspace, a nonprofit DIY bio lab in Brooklyn devoted to citizen science, where amateurs can go and tinker with biotechnology. Far from being a sinister Frankenstein’s lab (as some imagined it), Genspace offers a long list of fun, creative and practical uses for DIY bio.

Why you should listen

In 2009, after many years of working as a molecular biologist in the biotech industry, together with TED Fellow Oliver Medvedik, Jorgensen founded Genspace, a nonprofit community laboratory dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. Despite criticism that bioresearch should be left to the experts, the Brooklyn-based lab continues to thrive, providing educational outreach, cultural events and a platform for science innovation at the grassroots level. At the lab, amateur and professional scientists conduct award-winning research on projects as diverse as identifying microbes that live in Earth’s atmosphere and (Jorgensen’s own pet project) DNA-barcoding plants, to distinguish between species that look alike but may not be closely related evolutionarily. Fast Company magazine named Genspace one of the world’s “Top 10 innovative companies in education.”

What others say

“Ellen Jorgensen is helping to democratize biology—making it less the purview of academics and Big Pharma and more an enterprise accessible to anyone who wants a hands-on scientific experience.” — Discover Magazine, October 2011

Louise Fresco [Wageningen University] – We need to feed the whole World

A powerful thinker and globe-trotting advisor on sustainability, Louise Fresco says it’s time to think of food as a topic of social and economic importance on par with oil — that responsible agriculture and food consumption are crucial to world stability.
Louise Fresco shows us why we should celebrate mass-produced, supermarket-style white bread. She says environmentally sound mass production will feed the world, yet leave a role for small bakeries and traditional methods.

Why you should listen
As food, climate and water crises loom, Louise Fresco is looking hard at how we cultivate our crops and tend our livestock on a global scale. An expert on agriculture and sustainability, Fresco shows how cities and rural communities will remain tied through food, even as populations and priorities shift among them.

A former UN director, a contributor to think tanks and an advisor to academies in Europe and the United States, Fresco has noted how social unrest is made worse by hunger, poverty, environmental problems — and modernization. Responsible agriculture “provides the livelihood for every civilization,” Fresco says, but adds that mere food aid is not a solution to world hunger. She hopes that smart, local solutions for food production will improve war-torn areas and ease the pressures of regulations on production.

Fresco teaches at the University of Amsterdam, writes on policy and economics for the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad and is also a popular novelist.

What others Say
“There is no technical reason why we could not feed a world of nine billion people. Hunger is a matter of buying power, not of shortages.” — Louise Fresco, NRC Handelsblad

Koert van Mensvoort – Meat the Future

As the planet’s population speeds towards 9 billion, it becomes impossible to continue consuming meat like we do today. Some scientists believe in vitro, or cell-cultivated, meat is a sustainable and animal-friendly solution. But, before deciding if we are willing to eat meat from the lab, we need to explore the food culture it brings us. Dr. Koert van Mensvoort takes the stage to explain exactly what in vitro meat is, alongside an entertaining exploration into its creative potential – including Dodo nuggets and meat ice cream.