MONICA BUTLER: Stabilimentum is a project
that tries to bridge a new type of symbiotic relationship
between humans and spiders.
AMANDA HARROLD: So our project is called Liver Clear
and it's a bacterial membrane that will reside in your toilet
in order to filter out estrogen.
AARON NESSER: Our project was called Bioesters.
If you've ever had seaweed salad before,
there's kind of like viscous gel.
Extract that and kind of concentrate it,
that's what we were working with.
DANIEL GRUSHKIN: We are now in a culture
where everything's about the pitch.
You go to an accelerator and they have a demo day,
and it's all about sell, sell, sell.
We're trying to do something very different.
We're saying think, think, think.
The three goals of the challenge have been one,
to create a community of scientists, designers,
and artists who are all collaborating together.
Goal number two has been inform the public
about what the potentials of the technology might be.
And number three, hey, let's see some fresh ideas
in the space of biotechnology.
Let's see what we can do.
BAILEY BEATT: As droughts and desertification are increasing
on the planet worldwide, and existing water sources are
rapidly depleting, we do need to look
for other sources of water.
And the various members of the opuntia genus
actually have this great ability to collect water from fog
with specially designed spines.
So what we did is took inspiration
from these cacti to create synthetic panels that can
basically do the same thing.
AARON NESSER: Just by delving into the body of research
that's out there, we found this bio polymer algaenate
and started experimenting with it.
Kept learning more and more and more.
And we eventually came up with this fiber
that we extruded out of a syringe
and actually had some strength to it.
Fibers are kind of what makes the textile industry run.
And rather than growing it in forms,
we can extrude it and use any existing knitting machine
to fabricate the product that we're looking to make.
MONICA BUTLER: There's a type of spider fiber
that has a glue component to it.
And it's been identified that that glue not only catches
prey, but it also catches microparticles and pollen,
and other things that are in the air.
Basically, anything that's charged.
So our project take these natural spider web fibers
and use them for an air filtering system.
In our design, you don't really wear the spider.
We can have the spider here as a provocative statement
of what it could be.
What we're proposing is to create a good environment
for spiders to live in so that they would be happy, produce
webs, and then we could use the webs.
There would a disc kind of shape that
would have webs in the middle.
And you wear it as you would wear a mask.
AMANDA HARROLD: Our project is Liver Clear.
It's a biofilm, which is essential
a bacterial membrane that has specific bacteria
and microbes in it that can capture
and to degrade estrogen from your water supply.
Suddenly there are so many female fish in the rivers,
and they cannot reproduce anymore.
And that's where we stemmed from like this estrogen idea.
The idea is that it tapers off towards the normal hole
in your toilet.
And the estrogen will get trapped in this membrane here.
But the water can still go through
the honeycomb structure.
So your toilet will function normally.
And there is also an idea of having an indicator saying, OK,
this is coming out of your body.
Donald Trump's face will appear in your toilet.
DANIEL GRUSHKIN: I think the judges were
excited to see that the students, even though they
were art and design students, actually delved
into the science.
To be perfectly frank, it's not ready for showtime,
but that they had made the material,
that they had thought about how it might work,
how it's different from materials
that are already out there.
I think they were excited that the students had
explored context.