Ever since Charles Darwin proposed that animals adapt to their environment, scientists have dreamed of experimenting with this theory in a real-world landscape. Holding them back was the difficulty of creating a complex ecosystem that could be manipulated and controlled without placing wildlife at risk. Now, Robert Austin’s group at Princeton has found a way around this problem by fashioning a living, changeable ecosystem out of a tiny chip of silicon. The inhabitants of this artificial environment are E. coli bacteria. An article by Chad Boutin that appeared in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin this past February describes this work. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S17/03/44M87/index.xml