The $1 Microscope

The Prakash Lab is one of the real sources of creativity and ingenuity in the world today. They've debuted both the "Dancing Droplets" exercise and the Foldscope: a functional microscope made from paper for $1. I've been waiting for the Foldscope to be available publicly... and now it is! The Kickstarter just went live, and yes indeed, you can buy 20 microscopes for about $25. Can't wait to get these into students' hands in the lab! And I'll try to get them to Burundi too, for use in medical education there. Don't get me started on my ideas for outreach with this thing.

Hall of Fame of Cheap Science

The first day of class is always fun. I try to review two things:

1.) Cell Biology: Zoom in and out through the cell. How big are different biomolecules?
2.) Instrumentation: How to separate and analyze the parts of the cell with everyday items that could be used globally -- e.g., in Burundi. In the past few years this has expanded exponentially thanks to portable phones and 3D printing.

If I had a theme park, the first point would make a really great dark ride and the second would make for some EPCOT-like interactive exhibits.

Here's so you can listen in if you like (sorry for the loud scratchy mic at the beginning when I have to quiet them all down!):

Draw Your Own Graphene Circuits

The distinct electronic properties of carbon when layered in graphene sheets have always intriguied me. What kind of electronic properties lurk in what is mistakenly called pencil "lead"? And now it turns out that you can unleash some of these properties ... by drawing with a pencil on paper.

In this story the implications of this are explored. Bending even a simple circuit changes how it conducts electricity, and vapors affect the resistance of the pencil circuit lines. Because of this, you can actually draw your own circuit and make a vapor sensor from pencil lines.

So can this be used in the teaching lab? Or could the answer to a test question be drawn on a piece of paper -- and then checked by attaching electrodes to each end?

Thrifty Idea of the Week

How's this for a thrifty idea? Build big greenhouses next to power plants. Take the carbon dioxide exhaust from a power plant and use it to grow plants you can eat. The natural carbon-fixing biochemistry of the plants turns waste gas into tomatoes. Oh, and someone's already doing it.

Even if you doubt the warming influence of CO2, that doesn't really matter here -- it's about making tomatoes from what would be thrown away even more than what the thrown away stuff would do once it's thrown away.

I don't know how much of a dent this actually makes in rising CO2 levels (probably not much really), and I'm not sure how the workers in the greenhouse are impacted by higher CO2 (it's probably low enough that they are unaffected). But it seems like a good idea overall. Let's close the carbon loop.

Genomes for Africa

This link tells the story of how the Mars company (yes, that Mars-bar company) has decided to fund the sequencing of several plant genomes and post the information online. That's cool enough, but look at the list of included genomes: yam, finger millet, tef, groundnut, cassava and sweet potato, among others. These are staple crops in the developing world, and therefore they have eluded sequencing money, until now.

How this could really help is probably not in detailed gene manipulations, but in more mundane areas: grafting/cross-overs to make stronger crops and investigations into the plants' defenses against fungi. It's already helped with the cacao genome, funded and implemented in the same way a few years back.

Wouldn't this make a great project for undergraduates to investigate, using biochemistry in a way to help farmers across the world? I for one can't wait for these to come out. Biochemistry students of the future, you may have a lab exercise in this area. 

iPhone + Case = Portable ECG

Alivecor is a company that makes an iPhone case. There's two big bumps on the back of it, but those aren't a design flaw. They are contacts that allow you to complete a circuit with your fingertips and measure your heartbeat, so accurately that an electrocardiogram can be recorded. So a doctor can carry an ECG recorder in her pocket, on an airplane, and/or to Africa ...

When this was presented at a recent meeting, it was mentioned that one of the early-adopter docs who carries this around has been able to take ECG readings on not one but two plane flights so far and diagnose the problem accurately at 30,000 feet.

Here is the website for this fascinating invention. I wonder, what's next? How will cheap, portable computing change health?

Replacing Flow Cytometry with ... DVDs?

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I read a story about scientific ingenuity in middle school that, on a subconscious level at least, made me want to be a scientist. In it, a physicist was able to cool down matter with lasers into a state so cold that it collapsed in on itself, overlapping in space the way light waves do. He turned substance into light, it had something to do with the spin of the nucleus or something like that. Now, the best part of this was that this scientist didn't have money for all the lasers you use to cool down the matter, but instead he figured out how to dismantle CD players and use the ubiquitous mass-produced lasers from those to do that exact job.

Now there's something else that reminded me of that story, only with DVDs instead of CDs. In this link there's the story of how if you add an extra photodiode to a DVD player and then make this special DVD with microfluidic channels inside, then you can adhere a specific molecule to those channels, spin the DVD around and detect the cells that stick to that molecule using the DVD player. In short, you can look and see if the cells have a specific receptor or not.

If this can be made to work at low concentrations of cells (and that's a big if), then this could replace a $50,000 flow cytometer with a $200 DVD player. The immediate application discussed is an HIV test, but that's only the beginning. You could look for cells complementary to any molecule you could stick to the wall in high enough concentration. With $49,800 left over for other experiments.

That's the kind of science that I find truly exciting. Not the bigger more expensive instrument (that's for other scientists, it takes all kinds) but the cheaper more efficient instrument. The MacGyver effect, if anyone remembers that show -- although I personally was always more partial to the A-Team, potato, potahto. This is the kind of science I can do with undergrads in my lab. Something you can do with your own hands (and budget): that's exciting.

I'm going to start a new tag for this, because I keep finding examples. Let's call it "cheap science," although "MacGyver science" might be just as good. More to come ...