webcam microscope hacks at bosslab... Shaunalynn Duffy, Alec Resnick, and David Thompson lean closer as the ucam's image comes into focus. The camera cost $10 and took 5 minutes to hack. We hacked $10 webcams into microscopes, a la Hackteria.org at the bosslab + sprout. Yashas Shetty, Jason Bobe, Rich Pell, Myself, and others are planning a worldwide webcam hacking day on January 30th, in conjunction with the UCLA “Outlaw Bio” symposium. @molecularist (Charlie Schick) posted a great writeup with some photos on his blog. hello world, ucam style @jasonbobe was the first to have a cam connected to his...

U.S. Office of Science and Technology Po... The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, under directives from the President Obama administration, is soliciting public feedback. Note the deadline! (Dec. 10th-20th for this phase) Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 7:25 pm by Public Interest Declassification Forum By Diane DiEuliis and Robynn Sturm Yesterday we announced the launch of the Public Access Forum, sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Beginning with today’s post, we look forward to a productive...

diybio graphics... Last week I hired Micah & Caroline from WeAreaGoodCompany.com to design an extensible diybio logo and related illustrations. I gave them a quick intro to diybio and synthetic biology (see a lot of design notes here) and asked them to create artwork that could be used by diybio.org and built apon by regional groups + related organizations (diybio-nyc, bosslab, etc.). I stressed extensibility – the final design should support remixing by all interested parties. Micah & Caroline are about halfway done and I want to show you their work so far and solicit comments...

Bryan Bishop presents at and reports fro... Here I go. Start off with something like “Bryan got to speak at H+ Summit 2009 and spotted some neat numbers.” Maybe this will end up in GBM or H+ magazine as a small blurb? Bryan Bishop presented at the 2009 H+ Summit onopen source hardware and took copious notes. Here he presents some of his favorites: Patri Friedman. Meeting him in person is like meeting with a living legend. Hell, he wrote the book on seasteading. His talk was short and to the point: let’s make startups for governments and ways of organizing people. You know how everyone says let a thousand...

h+ magazine: diybio movement takes on ag... hplusmag - winter 2009 - cover "Hi there, Ray" Parijata Mackey wrote an article for the Winter 2009 h+ magazine about diybio titled “diybio: a growing movement takes on aging.” She provides an overview of diy -hardware, -software, and -wetware, and gives shoutouts to some of the projects listed at diybio.org/projects (man we gotta develop a better system for collecting projects).  Overall she provides an overview of where diybio came from and where it’s going in an optimistic manner consistent with h+. She also provides tantalizing interview coverage...

diybio-boston meetup at Sprout 22 Nov 09... @molecularist blogged about the 22 Nov 09 diybio-boston meetup at sprout and recently posted a great little video of the tour. You can see us setting up Sprout and touring through the mobile lab. Read Charlie’s full post for more info.

Introducing FutureLabCamp 2010... Open source hardware and software, low-cost and DIY instruments, cloud computing, and the internet of things. Come build the future of scientific labs. We are putting together a workshop called FutureLabCamp in Boston in early 2010.  The focus is building the future of science laboratories with open source hardware and software, low-cost and DIY instruments, cloud computing, and the internet of things. We’re bringing together hardware hackers, HCI wizards, standards builders, and forward-thinking researchers together for an amazingly productive weekend. It’s not...

The Boston Open Source Science Lab... The Boston Open Source Science Lab (BOSSlab.org) Hey DIYbio-Boston peeps, It’s been a while! I’ve been making progress on getting us a lab space here in the Boston area. I’ve acquired a shipping container that has a molecular biology lab built inside of it and am spinning up an organization to take care of it. It’s called the Boston Open Source Science Lab, or the BOSSlab (cred for the awesome name goes to a brilliant volunteer at the recent iGEM Jamboree). Some basic info about it online athttp://bosslab.org. My vision for the space is to develop...

iGEM 09 Jamboree DIYbio meetup recap... A bunch of interesting projects ideas were discussed at the DIYbio meetup during the iGEM Jamboree 2 weeks ago – here are my notes: Yashas Shetty wants to organize an international DIY microscope building session and subsequent videoconference for early December based on his DIY Microscope guide.  See http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/DIY_microscopy for instructions Alex Hornstein told us he had just been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and wanted to synthesize his own insulin, DIY-style. Would we help? Hell yes! A grad student from Harvard who had dropped...

The Bigger Picture: Domesticating Biotec... Scientific American Oct 1953 - Evolution in Bacteria DIYbio aims to be “the institution for the amateur,” developing and providing access to all of the resources a professional might have and an amateur might want, such as equipment, protocols, access to literature, etc. And we are collectively doing so in a distributed fashion right now. But we are also doing something more, something that will occur slowly, over long time-scales. We are helping lay the foundations for cultural shift. We are laying the foundations for broad, deep, domestic understanding of...