My favorite dive bar in SLC got a pinball machine!
Cute Dog and Baby Play Together (seen on Reddit) This WILL make your day better.
Open PCR machine.
This is such an excellent idea, I love the make community and I like the fact that people like OpenWetWare and these guys at Pearl Biotech are creating reasonably priced technology and sharing protocols to enable science. Their focus in the video is more on the home enthusiast in their shed performing SNP detection assays on their own genomes to see whether they have particular SNPs associated with particular genetic traits or diseases. This is great, but I think that there is actually a market for these in established laboratories.
Lab science, and particularly molecular biology is preposterously exclusive, PCR machines, a staple of any lab cost thousands of pounds. Not simply in initial outlay either, in servicing costs, breakdown costs (and they do break, frequently, inexplicably and frustratingly) and in the consumable reagents required to run the reactions. Often PCR machines are shared between groups or part of central facilities and have to be booked, partly to mitigate these costs.
When I’ve been performing experiments (which are themselves prone to failing, PCR has numerous, fun ways of going wrong that even the best experimentalists all regularly come across, there are whole books on the subject) I don’t want to have to book a slot the following day, I want my own PCR machine that I can use again immediately.
Ideally, I want a cheap PCR machine with parts that can easily be sourced and replaced myself rather than having to ship it (expensively) back to the manufacturer (often more than once). An OpenPCR machine would be perfect.
When a new student or staff member joins the lab, they could be presented with a cheap kit containing everything they need to make their own; along with getting email addresses, safety certificates, reading papers and locating the break room, their first job is to spend a morning assembling their PCR machine. They would then know it inside out, the fundamentals of how it works and goes together, and how to fix it when it goes wrong. There could be a central stock of cheap replacement parts in the lab and everyone else that works there also knows how to help make and fix it.
Lab technicians and managers are hard to find and hard to replace, there is a trend towards losing workshops and their associated technical engineers in biology departments as all the equipment is proprietary, daubed liberally over their, typically beige, surfaces in silver ‘warranty void if broken’ stickers, even plugs are sealed and can’t be replaced in house. An open machine would mean a return to the values of the workshop as central to the department (even if it probably wouldn’t mean bringing them back), fixing equipment rather than discarding and replacing (the sheer amount of waste in these terms from science departments is horrifying).
Cheap PCR (and other) machines means more experiments, it means more test experiments and more preliminary data to support grant applications that are stronger because of it and it means riskier, less conservative experiments can be done without worrying too much about cost and time. Ideas can be cheaply tested and discarded and more ideas will follow. This is in addition to the benefits to the shed-scientists, whose ranks I happily intend to join once we own a house, garden and shed.
There’s still time to support them on Kickstarter, though they’re definitely funded at the moment. Well done OpenPCR, let’s hope OpenPolymerase and OpenDNAGelStainThatDoesn’tTurnYourChildrenIntoMutants follow.
Cuddling with you even though there’s no feelings, whatsoever. That typa cuddling where we’re both on the couch or on the bed, good friends of the opposite sex comfortable enough with each other to simply do so. Though we both know that it’s nothing more than just cuddling as friends, yet there’s…
Hoy entre los temas que configuran la agenda del Congreso, estaba previsto al final del Pleno la Ponencia encargada de informar el proyecto de Ley de regulación del juego, pero al final ha sido…
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What kind of Purns would I be if I didn’t make you guys a Keep It Fun mix? Hope to see you tonight.
download
- Star Slinger - Mornin’
- Big Boi - Shutterbug Ft. Cutty
- Kanye West - Don’t Stop!
- Lil’ Wayne - 6’ 7’
- Taio Cruz - Break Your Heart
- Usher (Feat. Pitbull) - DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love
- Missy Elliott - Take Ur Clothes Off
- Wiz Khalifa - The Thrill
- Mark Ronson & The Business INTL - Bang Bang Bang feat. Q-Tip & MNDR
- Kanye West & Jay-Z - That’s My Bitch
- Janet Jackson - If
- Diddy & Dirty Money - Ass On The Floor (feat. Swizz Beatz)
- Usher Feat. Will.I.Am - OMG (Album Version)
- Taio Cruz - Dynamite
