>Teams participating in last year’s Synthetic Biology Competition wrote snippets of DNA code that were then inserted into bacteria or yeast, creating biological machines. The objective of the competition was, simply, to design the coolest machine.

>Consensus was that the Texans triumphed, with a tiny lawn of E. coli bacteria that had been programmed to act like a piece of Kodak film, holding an image that had been projected onto it. (Their clever message, spelled out in gold amidst an orange field, was a nod to the student’s traditional first attempt in a new programming language: “Hello World.”) But Caltech’s entry wasn’t bad, either: yeast that changed color based on whether it was immersed in regular coffee, decaf, or espresso.

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