Sissel Tolaas was a speaker at the World Science Festival in New York in June, discussing her Synthetic Aesthetics collaboration with Christina Agapakis. Sissel says, "Smell is one of those senses where context can play a huge role. A fine cheese and a dirty foot share the same molecular smells, yet one is a delicacy and other is repulsive."

For their BO_BAD_CHE project, Christina and Sissel collected bacteria from people and used it to make 'human' cheese. "We decided to focus on cheese as a metaphor for the human organism", explains Sissel. These personalised dairy products challenge the old adage of "we are what we eat", and the boundary between what we make and who we are. Their collaboration continues: most recently, at the SB5.0 conference at Stanford in June they ran a live cheese-making session, building a library of cheeses made from bacterial cultures swabbed from the global synthetic biology community. 

Synthetic Aesthetics' resident and Harvard synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis in conversation with Maggie Koerth-Baker, discussing synthetic biology, design, cheese and women in science and blogging. Watch the discussion here!

Paradoxically, improvements in emergency medicine have increased survival
albeit with severe disability ranging from quadriplegia to “locked-in
syndrome.” Locked-in syndrome is characterized by intact cognition yet
complete paralysis, and hence these individuals are “locked-in” their own
body, at best able to communicate using eye blinks alone. Sniffing is a
precise sensory-motor acquisition entailing changes in nasal pressure. The
fine control of sniffing depends on positioning the soft palate, which is
innervated by multiple cranial nerves. This innervation pattern led us to
hypothesize that sniffing may remain conserved following severe injury. To
test this, we developed a device that measures nasal pressure and converts it
into electrical signals. The device enabled sniffs to control an actuator with
speed similar to that of a hand using a mouse or joystick. Functional magnetic
resonance imaging of device usage revealed a widely distributed neural
network, allowing for increased conservation following injury. Also, device
usage shared neural substrates with language production, rendering sniffs a
promising bypass mode of communication. Indeed, sniffing allowed completely
paralyzed locked-in participants to write text and quadriplegic participants
to write text and drive an electric wheelchair. We conclude that redirection
of sniff motor programs toward alternative functions allows sniffing to
provide a control interface that is fast, accurate, robust, and highly
conserved following severe injury.

By Anton Plotkina,1, Lee Selaa,1, Aharon Weissbroda, Roni Kahanaa, Lior Haviva,
Yaara Yeshuruna, Nachum Sorokerb,c, and Noam Sobela,2

Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100,
Israel; Loewenstein Rehabilitation Hospital, Raanana 43100, Israel; and
cThe Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978,
Israel; Edited* by Brian A. Wandell, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved
June 24, 2010 (received for review May 13, 2010)

A.P. and L.S. contributed equally to this work.
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