Let's start discussing Hackteria's TAL "Wormolution" 12-15. Sep 2019 - Geneva

Dear friends,

let’s start our discussion on the upcoming Temporary Autonomous Laboratory “Wormolution” here on this topic. Add comments, questions, ideas to work on, materials to prepare.

12. - 15. September, Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland

Overview
Hackteria coordinates a Temporary Autonomous Laboratory during the early phase of “1000 Ecologies” inviting international researchers, artists and entrepreneurs as participants. The lab as a temporary construction should allow researchers from the fields of biology and engineering to collaborate with artists and so create links between the “two cultures”, the human sciences and the arts. On the topic of “Wormolution” participants will explore the territory between plastic as the abundant material of our society and the natural metabolisms and processes in nature. By combining their expertise, share simple instructions and engaging in critical and theoretical reflections artists and scientists will create new ways to combine multiple ecologies, maybe in a circular, maybe in a whole new way of freedom and awareness.

Keywords: Worms, Soil, Circular Economies, Plastics, Textiles, Metabolism, HLabX, Environment-culture, Lasers, Ecology and Life Sciences, Relational Biosphere

Participants
@gaudi, @Take, @paulapin24, @dusjagr, @weiweiweiwear,
and we need to add our other participants (Kat, Roland, Eleonore) to this forum!!!

See much more information on the Hackteria wiki

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I hope @Take can bring some Silkworm coccoons! We heard they are everywhere in his backyard :slight_smile:

Hi, Not true now, hahaha.
But I will bring some colored silk cocoon.
It’s natural color not gene edited

.

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hey! what kind of equipment will be available for experimenting? i was thinking it might be fun to develop methods to look at the archaeology of plastic in the soil… how’s that fit in with what everyone else is planning?

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Hi @kat happy we will finally meet. We have been trying density and chemical separation of microplastics in the last PlasticTwist lab session in Lucerne and Stuttgart. We filtered, sieved, used salt and sugar water and also tried digesting organic materials with hydrogen peroxide. We built centrifuges from harddrives and collected samples in the field. Happy to connect with you on that in Geneva. We also tried to stain the mircoplastic with Nile Red and took pictures in the ReSeq Fluorescent microscope. I can bring some Nile Red. We also feed daphia with fluorescent microplastics and took images to see how it was absorbed. (here is the picture of the daphnia and information about the fluorescent microscope https://reseq.hackteria.org/ ). Here some information on the last workshop: https://www.hackteria.org/wiki/HUMUS.Sapiens_on_TOUR

Started preparing for the Geneva lab:

Was thinking about Back_to_Bombyx ( https://www.hackteria.org/wiki/Back_to_Bombyx ) and try some more silk protein experiments. I still have some Silk Cocoons too. And some degummed silk (with sericin removed ). See this great paper with detailed instructions : http://2014.igem.org/wiki/images/4/4e/Silk_Materials_Protocol_Paper.pdf and here some documentation from my last experiments:
http://www.gaudi.ch/HTGAA/#Class10

I also still have some commercial and some DIY slide analyzer used to separate the proteins:

And then I was fixing up the Electrospinner that we used in Klöntal to cover things in nano fibers
ElectroSpinningExample

Electrospinning

Never used it with the silk from silkworms (only with dissolved ABS) and would like to try this in Geneva.

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Hey @gaudi that looks great - yes super I’m happy to connect in Geneva, looks like we’re using similar methods. So from the images the micro plastics came out of the daphnia digestive tract and into the organism?

I’m particularly interested in looking at adsorption of other chemicals onto the micro plastics surfaces - have you looked at that? I spoke to an interesting researcher the other day who’s been looking at bisphenol A adsorption and interaction with microplastic, and how that affects aquatic fauna see for instance https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/2/280

Hi, cool!
May be may be of interest, I did some earthworm installation back in 2010:
Dia de los Muertos
All the worms controlled a light sound installation.

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Hi all

Just some completely random ideas here for the wormolution, nothing worm here though…

I used to plan to use DSSC as light sensor with axoloti:

And then some stupid experiments of making DSSC onto conductive fabric:

And recently I found this PDMS DIY film:

Maybe it’s possible to make the DSSC inside PDMS.

At the moment I don’t have much clues for the concept, but it seems like a good experiment to me…

This is super cool!! I also thought about to make TiO2 threads for the DSSC solid form electrolyte by the same technique but I don’t have the machine, maybe can we try some TiO2 as well?!

Hi Kat

The daphnia absorbed lot’s of micro-spheres from the water. The daphnia in the picture is dead and maybe the digestive tract burst and the plastic went into the organism. Adsorption of chemicals sounds good, definitely want to know more.

We can try. The electrospinning needs some kind of a polymer. Maybe we need to mix the TiO2 into a polymer…

I am posting here a topic that @dusjagr came up with and that we discussed in a chat.

Making plastic from milk. Denaturing of milk to get Casein.

image

“From the late 19th century until the 1930s casein was the starting material for the plastic Galalith, the u. a. was used for buttons and jewelry, but also for electrical insulation purposes.”

“Friedrich Ernst Todtenhaupt (1873-1919) undertook with the Galalith Society at the beginning of the 20th century also attempts to make artificial silk, but they were not successful.”

plektren…

you can use it to make nice buttons:

Or art:

wikipedia

How to make plastic form milk:

Milk Casein Proteins: Ancient, Diverse, and Essential:

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thx for starting the “Cheesy” discussion here, @gaudi
was just about to do the same,… and put together the links on the wiki already!
https://www.hackteria.org/wiki/Wormolution_-_Hackteria_Temporary_Autonomous_Laboratory_at_1000_Ecologies,_Geneva#Cheesy_Plastics_Explorations

TheFirst_CheesePlastic
Let’s make “The Last” bioplastic!

Most instructions just use some kinda hard dried “paneer”… but let’s try chemical cross-linking with formaldehyde.

our Spanduk will be ready soon, the artist is just adding the final details, then some logos and sponsors and ready for big print!

any comments?

m

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Hello to everybody! I’m sorry for my late reaction, I was working on the new website of my project, that will go online in the next couple of days.

For the meeting I will bring my waxworms (picture) and some samples of the material they produce.

As a industrial designer I’m interested in the actual application of technology and science, so I was thinking doing a workshop where we design and build futuristic worm-incubators for different applications…I think that could be fun…Let me know what you think about it!

Welcome @Eleonore to our forum discussion!

for putting down materials and stuff to order, maybe easier to put it direcly into our gdoc here

i will be travelling to Bandung now for a wedding and flying. lets hurry up with materials prep this days!!

greets,
marc

Hey, has anyone tried the oil / micro plastic / magnetite experiment yet? I’d like to see what we could do with what we extract https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/videos/irish-teen-wins-googles-global-science-fair-removing-microplastics-water

It needs oil, magnetite and we can use local soil samples. I’m bringing one of Ale’s spectrometers from Berlin.

Apropos this I also read about carbon nanotubes with manganese being used to catalyse plastic breakdown. Might be interesting too? And some peroxide / hydroxide with iron oxide would be good to have to hand too.

u have some link?
i got some multiwalled cnt in stock.
m

https://www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385(19)30056-6

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