There’s still time to enter io9’s Build a Lifeform contest. Synthetic biologists, get cracking on the design of that synthetic lifeform or BioBricks lifeform! The rules are pretty straightforward; you need to propose a lifeform design that would be scientifically viable. The BioBricks lifeform part of the contest requires that your design needs to not only be scientifically viable, you have to explain how you would create it in a lab, and you get extra points if you already have an organism. The deadline is August 25, 2008. You could win the opportunity to attend an all-expenses-paid trip to the Synthetic Biology Conference in Hong Kong or $1000 and a chance to get your creature drawn by a cool comic book artist.
contests670 Articles
Hack A Day T-Shirt Design Contest
We need a new t-shirt. The current design is entering its third year. Help us out by designing a new shirt to give away at conferences. Dash has donated a Dash Express for first prize.
Some ground rules:
- You must incorporate the skull and wrenches logo in your design. You’ll find a larger version below.
- You can enter as many designs as you like to hackaday.shirt@gmail.com (JPG, GIF, or PNG mockups only please)
- The design can’t violate any copyright laws or trademarks.
- The design should be one color and the shirt doesn’t have to be black.
- By submitting your design you give us non-exclusive rights to use the image in the design of a Hack a Day t-shirt as well as for other Hack A Day promotional materials.
- We reserve the right to choose no design at all if we don’t like any of the submissions.
- The contest ends September 15th.
NYC Soldering Championships Tonight
The NYC Soldering Championships are happening tonight at Ignite in M1-5. It looks like there might still be some slots open if you want to compete. You can bring your own iron, it’s all through-hole, but you can’t use helping hands. Good luck, and we can’t wait to see how this inaugural event turns out!
[photo: Nick Bilton]
Name That Ware
Last month we mentioned [bunnie]’s Name that Ware competition where participants try to guess the functionality of a random bit of hardware. We thought you might want to see another example; pictured above is the June 2008 ware provided by [xobs]. You can see a high res version here and an image of the daughter card as well. Be forewarned that someone has already posted the solution in the comments. At first glance there are quite a few interesting bits: board is copyright 1991, the 8-bit ISA connector doesn’t have any data lines connected, just power, and it’s got a lot of analog circuitry. Take a guess and then check out the comments on [bunnie]’s site to see the solution.
NYC Soldering Championships
[Matt] let us know about the New York City Soldering Championships. They’ll be happening during the Ignite talks on July 29th at 7pm. 25 people will race head to head to assemble a fully functional electronics kit. Participants have to register in advance and are encouraged to bring their own iron. The kit hasn’t been chosen yet so people can’t practice. We hope they at least consider using a few SMD parts just to keep things interesting. Shout out if you’re planning to attend or compete!
[photo: Nick Bilton]
Build A Lifeform For Io9
Whether you consider yourself a bona fide mad scientist or you simply think your horrifying mutant creations are misunderstood, you’ll want to enter io9’s Build a Lifeform contest.
The contest doesn’t require any actual primordial soup, just a concept of a synthetic lifeform you think would be useful or interesting. There are two categories with different prizes for each one. The first category asks contestants to use the BioBricks registry of standard biological parts to design a lifeform that could be created in a lab. Descriptions of how it would be made, what it would do, and potential hazards in creating it must all be included with the entry. The winner of this category will recieve an all-expenses-paid trip to the Synthetic Biology Conference in Hong Kong in October.
The second category is more focused on creativity, asking for the same descriptions as the first category without any BioBricks data. While this is the more speculative category, proposed lifeforms must still be plausible to create using current technology. The prize is $1000 and a signed drawing of your lifeform rendered by “a cool comic book artist.”
Both categories offer pretty good loot for your concepts, just be sure they’re more original than an esquilax if you intend to win.
For the background on BioBricks, check out [Drew Endy]’s Hacking DNA talk from last year. He’s one of the judges for the contest.
Defcon Badge Hacking Contest
[Joe Grand] is designing the Defcon badges for the third year in a row. Just like the previous years, they’ll be hosting a badge hacking contest. This time around though, they’re going to start leaking clues in advance. Earlier contests were often frustrating because of the specialized equipment needed to talk to the microcontroller. Hopefully this year it will be a lot more accesible. The specs for the badge have not been released yet, but after last year’s 95 LED scrolling marque, we can’t wait to see what this year will bring. [Joe] has posted info on the previous two badge designs and resulting contests.
