Posts by Jason Bobe

In case you missed the December 2010 launch party in Brooklyn, Nature Medicine takes a tour inside the new Genspace community lab and talks to co-founder Daniel Grushkin (video link):

One of the most intriguing features of their space is a big glass box where all the lab equipment lives (much of it donated from a bankrupt biotech company).  The lab is constructed from several sliding glass doors drawn from the vast supply of found and recovered objects that occupy several floors of the Met Exchange building.  When I visited in December, I asked the Genspace folks the obvious question: Why did you build your lab in a glass box?  I learned that they had help from the (wonderful) Met Exchange owner Al Attara, who asked them for some basic requirements and they said “well, for starters, we know we want our lab to be open and transparent…”  They came back to the space a few days later, and, voila!  Lab in a (glass) box!  Made from sliding glass doors!

Read more about Genspace at their blog or follow them on twitter @genspacenyc.  See also the nice profile piece of Al and his Met Exchange in the nytimes.

Silkworms have been engineered to produce a more durable silk by augmenting them with properties from spiders.  The applications of the transgenic silk include textiles, sutures and wound healing, and even new bulletproof materials.

(HT Christina)

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See also a recent paper on the miraculous spidersilk produced by “Darwin’s bark spider”, Agnarsson et al. 2010. Bioprospecting finds the toughest biological material: extraordinary silk from a giant riverine orb spider. PLoS One 5 e11234 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011234

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 a conference – it is a workshop, with an emphasis on producing useful output.

Find out all about it, and sign up to get on the mailing list, at http://futurelabcamp.org.

We believe every lab instrument should provide a data feed of its measurements and that data aggregation and storage should be effortless, automatic and routine. To that end, our goal during the workshop is to prototype new and existing feed systems for popular lab equipment (Cameron Neylon’s work, Pachube, etc) and to develop a consensus of standards and an ecosystem of projects that lay the foundation for future work. When data aggregation is effortless and routine, a rich new landscape of opportunities emerges for data visualization, micro-attribution, augmented research, better scientific reproducibility, more finely-grained and realtime collaboration, and much more.

In addition to building prototypes, we hope to run several tracks dedicated to the applications of ubiquitous laboratory sensing:

• Hardware: Building open lab instruments and hacking existing lab instruments with an eye toward data logging and automation.
• Software: Automating, augmenting, and aggregating research; from mobile to desktop to cloud.
• Data: Starting, spreading, and refining repositories, journals, micro-attribution, uber-big datasets and standards. Making science machine readable.
• HCI: Natural User interfaces to augment research; visualization techniques for exploring the increasing influx of data

As we’re still in planning stages, we’d love to get your feedback on the event. Is this something you’d find useful? What in particular should we try to build at FutureLabCamp?  Let us know in the comments!