![]() ![]() The final slide is page 26 of the PDF, but it is labeled 32, so it’s clear that some slides were deleted from the deck before PhageLab shared it with me. The page numbering on the deck is wonky ( is labeled 1, but page 3 is labeled 2) so keep in mind that when I refer to slide numbers in this teardown, I’m referring to the page number of the PDF, not what’s on the slides themselves. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. The team shared their pitch deck with me, so let’s see what the company showed investors to raise its $11 million Series A round. Still, I love phages in general, and the idea behind PhageLab is pretty rad. One of the reasons broad-spectrum antibiotics work so well is that doctors often don’t know exactly which bacteria are wreaking havoc, and if you have a phage that attacks only a handful of bacteria, that could pose a challenge. Of course, the process is not without downsides. ![]() Unlike traditional antibiotics, phages can be designed to target very specific bacteria, and that lets us use them to kill only the bacteria you don’t want (say, salmonella), while your gut bacteria stay more or less intact. ![]() Phages are a type of virus that infects bacteria and kills them. PhageLab wants to come to the rescue with a different approach: using a phage (short for “bacteriophage”). Why? Capitalism: It’s really expensive to develop new drugs, and once they’re developed, it’s hard to make a lot of money on them. We’ve known this for years, but instead of accelerating, the work on new antibiotics is slowing down significantly. Guess which gene they all have in common? That’s right, the one that makes them resistant to antibiotics. Makes sense: Antibiotics kill off all the bacteria they can, but the remaining ones that somehow survive continue to grow and spread. Bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics. Here's a nice article that may give some ideas that students could look into to understand the purpose of tessellations in our natural world. As for the honey bees an interesting thing to look into is why do honey bees use regular hexagons rather than other regular polygon that tessellates- it has to do with optimizing the amount of honey a regular hexagon stores. I'm still thinking about how to move forward on this though. I am thinking about how I could create certain parameters in which the students will have to fill a finite plane of some shape and they will have to make some sort of prediction. I feel something is missing in my project that requires them to take it further than just designing their own. Although it is true that tessellations can be found both in the natural world as well as in more synthetic (man-made) products/ art/architecture. I am stuck in how to make this project more authentic to the students though. This entails an understanding in transformations, interior angles of a polygon and I differentiated by creating different roles: some students had to design a mutated figure that would tessellate with an equilateral triangle, square, regular hexagon, irregular triangle, and irregular quadrilateral. I am an 11th Grade math teacher and I have done a larger project with my students in which they have to design their own tessellation using Geometer's Sketchpad. I agree with John Golden, in that you could extend the idea to have student think about the "so what". ![]() I really like the idea of using pattern blocks to work with semi-regular tessellations. ![]()
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