My lovely and talented friend, science reporter Lindsay Patterson, recently interviewed Stanford's Ingmar Riedel-Kruse. Ingmar is a biophysicist creating video games that use living microbes! In Pacmecium (inspired by Pac-Man of course), the player guides live single-celled organisms around obstacles and targets, including a virtual chomping fish. The paramecia are attracted to a weak electrical field, which allows players to control their direction by watching the action on a laptop screen. Ingmar hopes that these games might eventually be used in schools to get kids more engaged with biology.
What I love about this podcast is that Lindsay enlisted the world-record holder of Pac-man, Scott Patterson, to test out Pacmecium and report his impressions. Listen here:
http://www.studio360.org/audio/xspf/141115/%3Fdownload%3Dhttp%3A//www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/studio/studio061711b.mp3
And here's a glimpse of the microbial video game:
Read the full story at Studio360.
