Want to do portable florescence spectroscopy on the cheap? Hojeong Yu, Yafang Tan, and Brian T. Cunningham wrote a 2014 paper that demonstrates that a smartphone camera, attached to a set of optical components that provide wavelength dispersion and a green laser pointer, can function as a sensitive fluorescence spectrometer.
Where the research money goes
Dr. Joe Alvin wrote in to let us know about an interesting blog post on the finances of science by Dr. Michael Johnson, from the Department of Immunobiology at the University of Arizona. The article lays out how the proceeds from a NIH grant are spent running a lab. The grant discussed worth ~2 million dollars […]
A 3D-printed Droplet Generator
This week the Harris Lab at Brown put up a paper on the creation of a 3D-printed droplet generator. The system is based off a previously published design by David Harris which generates droplets on the scale of 1 mm. This new system now provides ample open-source instructions, and is fabricated with a 3D printer bringing the […]
Accurate Enzymatic Assays in PCR Tubes
To achieve reproducible findings in many enzymatic assays, the substrate and sample must be incubated at specific temperatures without evaporation. If you don’t want to pay thousands for a 96-well plate incubator, than there are two main ways to do this: -The first is preparing 1.5mL Eppendorf tubes and thoroughly vortexing the final solution to […]
μCube: A Framework for 3D Printable Optomechanics
µCube, not to be confused with miCube, is an a framework for the design and assembly of 3D printed housing for optical devices. This includes templates for a Camera, and a light source, along with a myriad of other parts. You can check out Mihails Delman’s and Jim Haseloff’s paper on the μCube in the […]