Welcome to The Science Cheep, written for Lab On The Cheap, giving you all the updates in the DIY open-source world of science from the past week. Sign up for our newsletter here.
NEWS
Museums financially stretched from COVID-19
- Various museums have had to perform extensive layoffs and furloughs, the Field Museum in Chicago eliminated 71 positions, and furloughed 56 employees. The American Museum of Natural History cut full-time staff by 200 people, and put another 250 on indefinite furlough.
PAPERS
- Quantitative thermoelastic stress analysis by means of low-cost setups (via a bolometer)
- A cost-effective approach to DNA methylation detection by Methyl Sensitive DArT sequencing
- Design and development of a low-cost open-source 3D printer and its single response optimization using polylactic acid (PLA) material
- TDT Sandwich: An Open Source Dry Heat System for Characterizing the Thermal Resistance of Microorganisms
- The FAST Pump, a low-cost, easy to fabricate, SLA-3D-printed peristaltic pump for multi-channel systems in any lab
- Flexoskeleton Printing Enables Versatile Fabrication of Hybrid Soft and Rigid Robots
PREPRINTS
- If you are interested in sterilizing masks, check out a beautiful new preprint from Prakash’s lab: Applying Heat and Humidity using Stove Boiled Water for Decontamination of N95 Respirators in Low Resource Settings
OTHER
- A project on hackaday details how to make an arduino controlled 3D-Scanner.
- Siegfried Weisenburger shows how to make a homebuilt Petzval type lens for a DSLR camera, starting from basic design and costing less than 1000 euro!
- Jim Haseloff is designing a radial airflow incubator, and logging his work on Hackster.io, including a special post just about heatsink comparisons. It’s a very fun read!