https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/ Recent content in Articles on Liam Zebedee Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:42:05 +1000 https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/diagrams-from-biology/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/diagrams-from-biology/ Draft Diagrams · A Visual Essay Diagrams From Biology The pictures that made the field click — and what they add up to. Liam Zebedee · June 2026 I've been teaching myself biology, and these are the diagrams I kept screenshotting — the moments something suddenly made sense. Collected together they make an argument I didn't expect: that biology is, underneath, an information science. Life encodes a body in a one-dimensional string, computes the shape out of it, scales that one trick across twenty-four orders of magnitude — and we are only now learning to read and write the code ourselves. https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/project-bio-inspired-voxel-cell-morpohology-simulator/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/project-bio-inspired-voxel-cell-morpohology-simulator/ Cylinder Tree Smiley sheet Cone ■Stop Step Reset View on GitHub How it works Each voxel is a cell with its own small environment of variables. The seed starts at (0, 0, 0) with is-seed = #t; every tick, every existing cell runs the same Lisp program shown in the editor. The program can only use local substrate operations: check whether a neighbour exists, emit a named morphogen, read distance to the nearest previous-tick morphogen source, update its own state, and request replication into one of the six grid directions. https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/the-biological-stack-of-a-tree/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/the-biological-stack-of-a-tree/ Draft Field notes · A visual essay The Biological Stack of a Tree Read an organism the way you'd read a software stack — a tree at the top, a photon at the bottom, every layer computing the one above it. Liam Zebedee · June 2026 A tree is a stack. Not a metaphor for one — an actual tower of abstractions, each layer built out of the one beneath it, the way an app sits on a runtime sits on an operating system sits on silicon. https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/opentrons-26/ Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://liamzebedee.com/science/articles/opentrons-26/ Earlier this week we started learning about biology lab automation. There is this YC startup called Opentrons which built a robot for automating a large part of biological lab experimental protocols. An example of a protocol is "Golden Gate cloning" which is used to assemble large DNA molecules. To frame this in terms of a use case, as I currently understand: say you want to produce something like insulin.