We are so happy to be in our beloved Hong Kong to join Ed Tech Asia’s AI + Education conference where Juan will be part of the panel Cultivating the Creative Edge through Technology and Janneke will be discussing HomeScope as a platform to hybridize education and research using open science hardware!

We are very happy we have been awarded new research funds from Conicyt-Chile via it’s instrument Fondecy Regular 2019. We will use these funds to study swarming and collective intelligence in soil bacteria!

We are very happy Pablo (Bravo) has been accepted to the Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech! We wish Pablo the best of times in Atlanta! This is a great Ph.D. program at the interface of quantitative sciences (physics and math) and the biological sciences my friend and colleague Joshua started a few years when he moved to Georgia Tech.

Our last Chinese experience was a total success. Together with our Chinese collaborators we had an amazing research-by-doing summer school at Tsinghua University High School (ORIC+ or if you Wanna translate the 中文?) where we all learned together about nanotechnology, microfluidics, artificial intelligence, electronics, open source hardware and software. We constructed 5 Homescopes (DIY robotic microscope) and with them did research on microfluidics ecosystems on-chip were we tested the microbiome of Tsinghua’s campus as well as used artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning to describe the spatial ecology of these ecosystems. All in 2 awesome weeks, we learned so much from an amazing team of students (谢谢！你们学生). We love China (我们爱中国)!

On our way to Madrid to the Prado to work with Interspecifics on conversaciones especulativas/speculative communications.

Our fist lab outing in Chile was a success!!!. Thanks to all lab people (Janneke, Ivan, Miles, Alfredos, and Juan) and to ECIM, ECIM’s people, and special thanks to Glenda Llanos and Sergio Navarrete for setting up all the logistics for us and setting us up with the best room ever to hold a meeting/brainstorming/workshop sesh.

Some pics documenting キメロ.LAB@ ECIM ’16

In a nutshell: We learned to code in C and to code Arduino controller boards (thanks 2 Ivan), about Las Cruces urban history and development (thanks 2 Janneke), about cosmology (thanks 2 Alfredo L), about neurobiology (thanks 2 Alfredo A), about cellular automata & philosophy of science (thanks 2 紀皇) and Ecology (thanks 2 Miles). At the same time we also sampled and learned intertidal ecology as well as eat our ass off at the town local sea food restaurants. We also focused (or attempted to) on a strategy for experiments and theory to understand bacteria (or maybe all cell types) in space and time after all we learned from the outing.

The timetable was almost followed on time Dutch/Chilean/French/US style.

We welcome Gabriel Ramos to the Lab. Gabriel is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Department of Physics (DFI) at U.Chile’s FCFM pursuing a Ph.D degree working with Rodrigo Soto and Maria Luisa Cordero. He is interested in bacteria-driven droplet dynamics in chemo attractant gradients.

The HKUST video channel has publish the talks from the amazing workshop on symplifying biology from the perspective of physics, held at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 香港科技大學 , that Janneke and Juan attended on December 2014. Here a selection of 4 talks:

1.-Opening by Bob on spherical cows and arrogant bulls.

2.-Talk by Juan on bacterial waves and metabolic fields.

3.-Talk by Shashi on active matter and coupled oscillators.

4.-Bob’s Talk about field theory in biology.

Janneke and 纪皇 (Juan) are back from the 2016 Shenzhen Assembly in 深圳, 中国 where the amazing 中国人 treated us very nicely and made us feel at home. We learned a lot about DIY sensors and most importantly how to remember to evolve exponential responsibility in the face of an exponential growth of many technologies such as cheap prototyping, open source electronics, DIY biology and learning and teaching open science in hacker spaces. Shenzhen is an amazing city to accelerate learning and teaching with open technologies. In particular we have made many new friends in the maker movement who share our interests in open science and open education such as Seeed studio and Open FIESTA.

Million thanks to co-organizers Sage Bionetworks, CRI-Paris, Institut Pasteur and 清华大学 for putting together such an intellectual and emotional treat!

For geographical balance in the Keymer lab, we are happy to host Ivan, coming from France for a 6-month internship to work on theoretical biology and maybe get his hands dirty on the lab´s bench.