The LavaAmp is a portable PCR thermocycler that has the potential to become the default garage biology (home biology, bioDIY, DIYbio) tool once it hits the market. Think of Apple II for personal computing or MakerBot for 3D printing.
The 1st LavaAmp prototype was shipped this week from Biodesic to Gahaga Biosciences and the process is documented and engineering details uncovered in Rob Carlson’s post.
The people behind are mainly ex SciFoo Campers and open science advocates: Guido Nunez-Mujica, Joseph Jackson, Rob Carlson, Jim Hardy and a cool engineer Rik Wehbring.
Herein, we introduce an innovative thermocycling system that
harnesses natural convection phenomena to amplify DNA rapidly by the PCR in a greatly simplified format. A key element of this design is an architecture that allows the entire thermocycling process to be actuated pseudo-isothermally by simply maintaining a single heater at a constant temperature, thereby enabling a pocket-sized battery-powered device to be constructed at a cost of about US$10.
Realizing the potential of the device and thinking about how to build a digital thermocontroller for it with the Arduino I contacted Victor Ugaz this January and was informed that they only built the proof-of-the-concept devices testing them in the lab interested mainly in ‘understanding the physics of the thermally driven flow and its effect on the reaction’. But it was obvious to me that somebody will produce those devices for the market and make them affordable to people as it seemed to me as the familiar case of the low(est)-hanging-fruit.
So when Joseph Jackson mentioned to me his grandiose open science plans and the groups’ ‘super affordable pcr’ project I became instantly interested. As Rob Carlson writes:
The intended initial customers are hobbyists and schools. The price point for new LavaAmps should be well underneath the several thousand dollars charged for educational thermocyclers that use heater blocks powered by peltier chips.
Let us assume that you are a technological early adopter, a maker, a hacker, a geek. Your software/hardware skills and experiences are much better than the bulk of licensed physicians. You also have a G1.
Now imagine a mobile application/gadget-in-a-belt-pouch that is the most advanced telemedicine solution in the market. With this application/gadget you were able to non-invasively monitor vital signs of the people that matter you the most at anytime from anywhere around the world. You were able to quickly recognize life threatening heart and respiratory problems of the people you care about and maybe save their lives.
The problem is that such a product exists according to this press release (via androidguys) but you are not allowed to legally use it (no information on the details of purchase yet) unless you are a registered and licensed physician. The press release does not offer any reasonable (legal?) explanation on why this is the case.
The first Euro Maker Faire in Brussels was an evening event but now with the first UK Maker Faire makers have a chance to hang around for 2 days and develop or deepen their DIY skills similar to the original US events (we enjoyed AustinMakerFairein 2007). Let me know if you’re interested.
from my mailbox:
We are shortly to publicly announce the first UK Maker Faire but thought you would appreciate advanced notification.
The Make team forwarded me your names and email addresses as they believe you might be interested in the Newcastle upon Tyne Maker Fair on March 14th-15th 2009.
The first UK Maker Fair will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March as part
of Newcastle ScienceFest – a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and
innovation.
This two-day, family-friendly event celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset and features interactive exhibits organized by individual enthusiasts, hobbyist groups and clubs as well as student groups. It’s for creative, resourceful folks who like to tinker and love to make things. Maker Faire is an opportunity to share what you do with others. Read the rest of this entry »
Following Matt Cutts’s tweet I am now writing my blog post using the CrossOver Chromium browser which is a Mac and Linux port of the open source Chromium web browser. Google Chrome (Windows-only so far) is built with open source code from Chromium that means I have now a functional Google Chrome clone under Leopard on my MacBook. This is almost the same experience just like 2 weeks ago. I can use the omnibox, the new home tab and the very clever tab arhictecture amongst others but first of all the browser is now more or less integrated into my customized OS X environment and that is a big advantage. There are of course, inconveniences like crashes and problems with the shortcuts due to the Windows – Mac crossover solutions (which can be modestly modified with Preferences).
BioBarCamp is due in circa 3 weeks and we have now 45 BioBarCampers signed up on the list of attendees and our host the Institute For The Future has the capacity for around 55 more campers, roughly for 100 people in general. We already have a very valuable mix: researchers, biologists (grad, postdoc, PI), coders-engineers-bioinformaticians, biotech entrepreneurs, doctors, science journalists.
Here is the list so far and that’s also a chance for you to decide whether you want to join and meet us there in Palo Alto on the 6th and 7th, August and share, ask and answer, be the donor and receptor of ideas from all around biogeekdom. I am continuously trying to collect some links on the campers on the BioBarCamp FriendFeed Room to make future Campers preconnected.
Desktop background images are important parts of people’s everyday lives in terms of unintended staring time. Usually they are picked up for the eyes (sg spectacular & cool and/or sexy) and hearts (family members), but why not use them for information uptake and learning? So I’d like to ask: What’s your current science related desktop image, if there’s any and how can you utilize it? Here is my current desktop image with the source;
Bonnet et al.:
A Mitochondria-K+ Channel Axis Is Suppressed in Cancer and Its Normalization Promotes Apoptosis and Inhibits Cancer Growth Cancer Cell Volume 11, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 37-51
Figure 1. A Reversible Metabolic-Electrical Remodeling in Cancer Contributes to Resistance to Apoptosis and Reveals Several Potential Therapeutic Targets
In part 1 we had Skull from the game zone. Now comes the loser geek archetype George McFly - played by Crispin Glover – from Back to the Future or at least his laugh. The relation between Skull & George is more than obvious: chocolate milk. (Yes, it’s weekend.)
The O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp is a nice option for the emerging personalized genomics companies or any web-related biotech startups to communicate and cooperate with alpha geeks and early technology adopters.
The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year’s Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each topic rather than a lecture, in which participants will learn from each other as well as from entrepreneurs who’ve already been successful.Read the rest of this entry »
“That’s the problem these days,” 2K says. “Nobody wants to do work hard. Everybody wants easy. In my days, we knew what heavy lifting was. I had to carry rocks to my cave in the office. We carried rocks to write on. We wrote our code with a hammer and a chisel. That’s not software kid. That’s hardware.”Read the rest of this entry »
“Skull is in the game zone, right now. And you don’t want to mess with him when he is in the game zone. He once played for 4 days straight on 1 quarter, a gallon of chocolate milk and an adult diaper.”
There is a pattern of successful technological innovations I can summarize the following way: there is a nerd engineer who actually invents something and builds the first functional prototype, and there is a geeky enough yo who recognizes the value of the prototype and makes the bigger money/fame/other beneficiaries out of it by turning it into a commercial product: the archetypal nerd/geek pair in this respect is Wozniak/Jobs. In case of the wiki software the programmer/inventor was WardCunningham, while Jimmy Wales became the official Mr. Wiki due to Wikipedia.
Recently I discovered Cunningham on Twitter and I learnt that for coding he takes inspiration from life’s processes ranging from cell signaling to cultural evolution. His coming speech: Read the rest of this entry »
Building and using low budget but high tech devices at home is a main motivation behind hacking. A Harvard Chemistry Research Group now created a microchannel producing device using a Hewlett Packard 7550A Graphics Plotter (see some eBay prices) to perform a diagnostic protein assay with it amongst others. /See my SciFoo microfluidics coverage./
“The system works like this. By replica moulding, the pens of the plotter are replaced with PDMS versions that can deliver various types of ‘ink’. The purpose of the ink, when cured, is to create channels in a filter-paper substrate, and after experimenting with the possibilities Bruzewicz et al. found that a syrupy mixture of 3:1 PDMS:hexane did just fine. Having chosen the appropriate paper, the trick then is to use the plotter to draw channel shapes, with the PDMS syrup penetrating the full depth of the paper to create water-tight chambers in various patterns.”
Computer.
• Computer: Dell Dimension 4100, Pentium III Processor (1 GHz)
• Plotter: Hewlett Packard 7550A Graphics Plotter
• Operating System: OpenSuSE Linux 10.1, Novell Corporation. Available for free download
• Additional Software:
1. Inkscape – vector drawing program, for design of channels. Included in OpenSuSE, also available for free.
I’ve always loved the following scene from LOTR, but I’ve always imagined that they are the words of a man who is in a healthy physiological condition due to a robust life extension technology and not due to a mystical ring:
Bilbo: “Today is my one hundred and eleventh birthday!”
Hobbits: “Happy birthday!”
Bilbo: “Alas, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits.” [cheers abound.] “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
Larry Page is 35 years old today and it’s really easy to consider him as a representative man of his/our generation (I am 33 years old) including his future prospects. A company with an unlimited potential was built on Page’s unfinished PhD. research project.
In the last couple of weeks I became heavily interested in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology probably because the dangerous idea of all pervasive computing and the opportunities to build sg from the bottom-up. So here is a how-to to my first installed low frequency, read-only RFID system hopefully followed by a more juicy stuff in the ultra high frequency range up to 9 meters.
Code in C programming language for using the Arduino with the Parallax RFID reader but in order to upload it to the Arduino board and make it actually work I had to put the reader activator line:
The idea of doing biological experiments with current biotechnological methods and conducting research projects at home is quite new. There are already many names in use referring to the same concept: bioDIY, home biology, biotech DIY, garage biology.
We have a detailed case example which can be considered as the first registered, high profile biotech DIY activity starting the era of useful garage biology: Recently Hugh Rienhoff amplified his daughter’s DNA at home to help doctors figure out her genetic disorder. From the Nature cover article:
“So he bought a used PCR machine, a microcentrifuge, some small-volume pipettes and a brand new gel box. All told, the equipment cost him about $2,000. With these simple tools and some sequence-specific DNA primers of his own design, he could pick the relevant genes out of his daughter’s genome and amplify them enough for sequencing. Freezing the samples and packing the tiny tubes on ice, Rienhoff sent them off for sequencing at about $3.50 a pop. He prepared upwards of 200.”
In my coming series I’d like to examine the following conditions of a mass biotech DIY movement: acquiring skills, affordable kits, tools, hardware, motivations, business opportunities and impact.
acquiring the how to skills:
- good education tools, protocols, videos, howto-s on the web
- short intensive academic or industrial lab courses available for every citizen
- cheap kits: based on the Rienhoff example, a very basic home lab can be set up out of 2-3000 dollars, which is the price of a good laptop.
says Mr. Rienhoff in an email: I bought all the equipment used from a local vendor who buys equipment at auction and from universities. All the gear is at least ten years old so it was very used and low throughput. But given that my project was incredibly focused I did not need the more sophisticated equipment.
Finally back from my Bay Area trip, the workshop I participated turned out to be very stimulating in terms of people and ideas. Also visiting The Blood Knot performance at the American Conservatory Theater and having a drink with Monya&Dan were absolutely delightful. I missed my flight on Saturday, so I slept in LA (and missed my wife) and discovered the city to the amount of a Taco Bell dinner near to the La Quinta Hotel. Also I did a little geek tourism and visited the South Park area in San Francisco (but forgot to check the Wired headquarters) which was so nicely described in Aaron Swartz‘s unfortunately unfinished (but not unfinishable) Bubble city:
Downtown San Francisco is a world of carefully-gridded streets and looming skyscrapers, but hidden behind a gas station on Third is a place that almost looks like another world. The sun shines brightly upon a park with green grass and tall shady trees and vibrant swings with children. The park is an oval and the perimeter is lined with small, pastel-colored buildings. Here and there are a smattering of small cafes and restaurants. And the other buildings are filled with startups. Twitter here. Adaptive Path there. Even Yahoo, when it wanted to encourage its employees to be more startup-y, opened up an office in the neighborhood. Sit on the grass and chances are you’ll sit near a friend from another company or bump into them in line at a cafe. The place crawls with companies and back on the street, surveying the scene with a distant but watchful eye, lie the journalists, whose publications cover with awe the rumblings of those below. It was here that Newsflip made its home.
What’s the best thing to do if Google wants track you down and you are“a geek, the kind of person who searched Google every time a thought passed through his head”. Well, Aaron Swartz‘s nervous nerd novel, Bubble City (I summarize my thoughts on it in the next post) has a geeky algorithm to play with in Chapter 9:
Thus, to be sure Google can’t track you, you need to do at least three things: never long in, never accept tracking cookies, and use some kind of anonymization of your IP address (like Scroogle or Tor). And that’s just for the Web.
At least I know what I will read on the plane over at the Atlantic tomorrow back to old Europe: Bubble City by Aaron Swartz. What by who? Bubble city is a blog tech novel with chapters as posts. The story takes place in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley around a startup called Newsflip going deep into current web techniques, startup happenings, Google trends & types and tokens of people with the tools of fiction. It is well written, it is witty, I’ve just started but quickly became excited about it due to its experimental character and the insider angle of the writer behind. Bubble City is the brainchild of Aaron Swartz Reddit cofounder, who is an extremely talented 20 year old American programmer, hacker (think of George Hotz or young SaulKripke tinkering with modal logics), although in his blog Raw Thought (long time blogroll guest of Pimm) he usually writes like an old central European, highbrow human intellectual with the necessary cultural references. And that makes him a very interesting phenomenon, one that is almost missing in the American tech-web scene: an intellectual with a broad spectrum of interests and arguments. I met Aaron at the last seconds of the SciFoo Camp at the Googleplex (he writes a lot about the Number One Plex) and really liked his celebrity focused gossip liveblogging account on the event with people like Tim O’ Reilly and Henry Gee explaining themselves in the comment section.
Hopefully Aaron will be able to finish Bubble City by excluding or neutralizing or properly incorporating outworld reflexion (like this and that of Blogoscoped) into it. Finishing a novel and completing a code are not the same though and epic talent has the bad habit not to let young writers reach perfection in their early trials.
Here are 2 sections from Bubble city and the links to the 11 chapters so far (it is not aggregated as far as I know and you always have to change the numbers at the end of the URL):
He popped open the recording software, making sure he got his nose squarely in its frame, his face so close that spittle would land on the lens. In a world where every teenage kid could stream a live feed of himself having sex to millions, only the most aggressive vlogcasters survived. Wayne was no dummy. He didn’t get to be the number seven blog in the TechnoScene rankings by sitting back and offering his opinions. No. This was war and every show a battle.
Today’s enemy? Newsflip, one of the crummy little online news aggregator sites, which was threatening to write him out of the history books by dumping the technology he’d single-handedly invented, news notation analysis (NNA), and going with some upstart competitor that didn’t even bother to have an acronym for a name. Sure, Newsflip was a tiny site in the scheme of things, but if it switched it would set a dangerous precedent.
Downtown San Francisco is a world of carefully-gridded streets and looming skyscrapers, but hidden behind a gas station on Third is a place that almost looks like another world. The sun shines brightly upon a park with green grass and tall shady trees and vibrant swings with children. The park is an oval and the perimeter is lined with small, pastel-colored buildings. Here and there are a smattering of small cafes and restaurants. And the other buildings are filled with startups. Twitter here. Adaptive Path there. Even Yahoo, when it wanted to encourage its employees to be more startup-y, opened up an office in the neighborhood. Sit on the grass and chances are you’ll sit near a friend from another company or bump into them in line at a cafe. The place crawls with companies and back on the street, surveying the scene with a distant but watchful eye, lie the journalists, whose publications cover with awe the rumblings of those below. It was here that Newsflip made its home. Read the rest of this entry »
I am not watching to many videocasts, but the last 5 epizodes of the Make Weekend Projects with Bre Pettis are always on my iPhone and viewed every time. Now Anna over at Videovooreports on the coming Make:TV featuring half-hour episodes that will be presented in High-Def TV and streamed on the web in as early as 2008. Anna made a detailed email Q&A with Philip Torrone, senior editor and alpha nerd on the emerging video and TV side of Make:
The first Make video was uploaded on YouTube in March 22, 2006 (if I’m not mistaken), while Make TV show started to run on Blip.TV in July 2006. As for Blip.TV, Phillip Torrone senior Make editor says “we like the player, the high quality playback and the team at blip”. However, YouTube still brings more eyeballs than Blip.TV – maybe more revenue too? Since December 2007 Make magazine has been in the YouTube Partner program, so they will get some revenue from the most popular video social networking site too. In 2008 they are also getting on air more ‘officially,’ harvesting more exposure on more screens, which is a nice example of an online success story spreading out on a national TV channel well-known for educational science programs. What can we expect in 2008? Read the rest of this entry »
Our new Boo XO laptop is not just smart, but has nothing to be shamed about when compared to, say Apple laptops in design. It is an excellent source of funny pictures too. Picture composition: Anna.
In November we participated in the “Give One Get One” program in which people can donate an XO laptop to a child in the developing world and receive one. Yesterday we got ours, named Boo and Anna recorded the first moments of Boo at our home and published it on her blog Videovoo with detailed account. Unfortunately we don’t have information on where our “Give one” laptop has been landed and who (and how old) is the happy owner of it from now on.
Wired’s Geekipedia is marketed as “People, places, ideas and trends you need to know now“. As such you can find biology and biotech related terms in it (part of the current hip and tech-savvy culture) like ‘stem cells‘, ‘RNAi‘ or ‘brain implants‘, explained. But you won’t find the terms ‘Natureplex’, ‘executable cell biology’, ‘Open Notebook Science’, ‘SciFoo Camp’, ’23andMe’ or ‘Pharyngula’ in it. The idea of building a Geekipedia (call it Biogeekipedia) specialized to the life sciences (biology, biotech, biomedical sciences, bioengineering, biobloggers…) seems pretty straightforward. (Or you can expand it to all natural sciences, but that is not my concern here.) So here I’d like to ask my readers to suggest entries for this Biogeekipedia, exotic, rare, but cool niche terms, buzzwords, good phrases, sentences, ideas and people within the biotech realm (web included) we all need to know. Use your imagination instead of your tag cloud. I start with my own embyronic list right now on the top of my head without links and explanations (Intensive work hours are inversely correlated to the number of quality blog posts). Needless to say it is more of a joke than a serious adventure. (List updated with the suggestions of Mr. Gunn, Jon Rowley and Matthew Oki O’ Connor.)
badge (actually I used my SciFoo badge just inside out, there was a modified Google Search Box on the other side with an “I am feeling Evil” button)
components desperately needed, but I haven’t had the time to make them: horns and Google spiders for crawling (the arachnid-centric names for the Web are ideal for Halloween reasons)
Problem: For a Halloween costume to be cool it should be targeted for the local Halloween audience and New Orleans is not the geek but the freak capital of the world, so almost nobody recognized me.
P.S. Actually I wanted a dead Google employee costume, but then Grady came out with the idea of Mr. Evil Google
After a hard experimental week (I have now around 55 T-75 or T-175 flasks with 6 different growing cell lines in the incubator) finally I have been able to turn a little weekend attention to move a step further with my home electronics “maker” plan. Instead of buying a complete Arduino starter pack ($65) I’ve just bought an Arduino diecimila open source microcontroller and a tiny breadboard on the Austin Maker Faire. But now I moved to the closest Radio Shack to get some capacitors, resistors and transistors. With all this investment so far I am still under $70. Bu I forgot to buy wires, hookup for the breadboard, stranded to panel-mounted components like LEDs, and I don’t have proper tools yet, like soldering iron and wire striper, multi-meter and loupe. Basic reference: MAKE The home electronics issue, particularly Charles Platt Your Electronics Workbench For programing an Arduino you need a PC, and my backup laptop, the iBook G4 is just perfect for that purpose. Next issue was to make the system work, and here is a step by step process, basically you download the programing environment and install it with the USB driver, then connect a LED (positive (longer) leg of the LED to pin 13 and the negative (shorter) leg to ground (marked “GND”), plug in the Arduino and upload the first trial Blinking LED code to the board and run it. Voila, you have the system.
For open source hardware you need open source software and a modular hardware design that makes building customized hardware just as easy as writing software or web apps. In order to make the idea mainstream you need to commercialize it and that’s what exactly Bug Labs is planning to do. (Again, my bioDIY brain says, that we should apply this concept to biological components too on different levels, just like nucleotide (DNA, RNA), protein, organellar, cellular, tissue level, and make them available to home tinkerers).
One interesting session at the Austin Maker Faire was the chat on Open Source Hardware with Limor Fried and Phil Torrone and Anna recorded it with her new camcorder, so please check Anna’s comments to learn more and see the talk:
The biggest impact of the Austin Maker Faire on me was that yesterday I bought an open source, CC licensed Arduino microcontroller and a breadboard for building prototype electronic circuits. I am a total rookie in home electronics but I thought it’s never too late to learn completely new things with the help of our extended memory, the web.
In the long run I’d like to utilize my microcontroller (or the acquired knowledge) for biological purposes in the lab and not just blinking LEDs.
Have you heard of any quality biotech-biology based community (blog, forum, network) specialized in electronics or coding for researchers, online?
At last a real family event for Anna and me: we are heading to Travis County Fairgrounds, Austin, Texas on October 19th to visit the MakerFaire. This will be the 3rd American MakerFaire, and the first outside the Bay Area. I am prepared to meet enthusiastic makers and mind-blowing DIY projects there, as well as to say hello to Phil Torrone, Dale Dougherty or Mike Hendrickson, the latter 2 I met at the Euro Maker Faire in Brussels (and Mike as an old Foo was at the SciFoo Camp too, offering me to laser etch my then-new and then-beloved iPhone).
Similarly to the Edmonton Aging Symposium which reportedly “was a WORLD FIRST! in being streamed live onto the internet” (Kevin Perrott) amongst conferences, a selection of the presentations of the SENS3 conference are now available at the personal website of Richard Schueler. Richard is a big mouthed, cowboy hat geek with a serious life extension commitment who orchestrated the Kurzweil distance video talk on his sony tx and logitech webcam at the conference.
SciFoo is over, and I’ve just arrived back to New Orleans from SF. First of all: a big thanks for the organizers (Chris DiBona, Timo Hannay, Tim O’Reilly, Google, Nature, O’Reilly) and campers, it was really the highest end. Here is a quick SciFoo key terms summary (photos, detailed accounts later):
“scientific data”
One of the most frequently used key term was “scientific data”. And the question is: how to collect, upload, organize and index them. With the exponentially increasing data sets, that are produced by scientists worldwide, it is obvious that we need really powerful tools to benefit them. After a couple of beta years it is highly probable that Google (according to its mission statement) will offer new ways to manage the enormous amount of valuable scientific data. Without that, the efficiency of the science industry will dramatically decline.
“science publishing”
Yes, the old question ranging from open access science to different pre- and post publishing opportunities, addressing peer-review tools. A new and clear vocabulary is needed. Nature people were honest about the problems, asking for the optimal solutions.
“the geek factor”
Mainstream scientists are rather conservative folks, they can easily have revolutionary thoughts in their niche research fields, but are not too open minded and experimental when it is about new web and technology tools. The alpha geeks from the O’Reilly Media reminded the science population of the SciFoo (not the typical technology neutral mainstream scientists) that there are many innovative things that could be done in and out of science too. (You don’t necessarily need the newest Mac gadgets for that, just try out some mind performance hacks)
This slide comes from the presentation of Google Fellow Jeff Dean on Seattle Conference on Scalability, entitled Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets. (The title Google Fellow seems to me as something similar in rank to a full professorship at Stanford.)
I like Google and Apple products, but my expectations are focusing on how these products can help and facilitate me as a scientist, especially as a biomedical research scientist. With the Science on the iPhone test series I’d like to examine in details how proper and user friendly is the iPhone as an ultimate portable, mobile, convergent handheld gadget (or at least the first version of that line) for scientific purposes based on real experience. Briefly: can we use it as a SciPhone?
Amongst others I’ll concentrate on the following: the passive, science consuming opportunities like text reading, photo, presentation and science video watching and the active, science-making issues like writing texts, making photos and giving presentations.
Also I’d like to take a look on how the iPhone fits into the frame of the present scientific web, and how good is for scientific communication. (Photo: my bench this afternoon.) Read the rest of this entry »
On Friday we went to a Harry Potter Midnight Magic party at the Uptown Tulane Campus. There I met Noah from Michigan, who was videoskyping on his MacBook Pro with his brother in Los Angeles. Our 3 minutes talk was an excellent exemplar of what I call “fast networking”: Facebook confirmation, iPhone presentation, blog introduction, useful information exchange. When leaving I took a shot of Noah scanning Pimm’s Architecture of the scientific web post (see second picture). Without the gadgets we might not have started to talk.
The 2 main drawbacks to reading PDFs on the iPhone are the must-send-it in email in order to store and open “solution” and the user-unfriendly, landscapeless left-right scrolling reading mode. Not anymore. Both problems can easily be overcome with the help of a Safari browser hack using the almost forgotten data: URI schemes. From now on you can store and open your PDF files (and many others) in the iPhone’s Safari browser even in the Wi-Fi- and EDGE-less airplane mode and you can read PDFs in a landscape mode with only 1 one pich (that fits a column) and significantly less left-right scrolling in a much more satisfying, although not yet perfectly manner.
Here I show you in 4 steps how to do so.
1. Convert your source PDF file (by encoding an uploaded file from your folders or from URL) to a valid data: URI format with the help of a converter. I used the online The data: URI kitchen encoder but others are available too, you can even use a Perl script (and run it with Terminal under Mac OS X, thanks Mike). This will generate a very long and ugly URI line. (Sample PDF: Proposition 71 of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine)
2. Copy/paste the long and ugly URI code into Safari and add it to your Bookmark Bar.
3. Sync your iPhone’s bookmarks with your Mac’s Safari bookmarks via iTunes, with that you can create a direct link for the PDF on your iPhone’s Safari bookmarks.
4. You’re ready, open the PDF file from the bookmarks and read it with a 1 pich landscape mode.
As in the case of my old iPod, I’d like to use myPhone to access the scientific world and web from everywhere, not just as a tool of coolness. (Warning: Macbook shots, bad quality pictures on a good quality experience).
The Natureplex (Nature Web Publishing Department on the second floor of a renovated warehouse with around 25 people near at King’s Cross, London) nerds are still busy: Scintilla, a science recommendation engine was launched based on aggregating science content from RSS/Atom feeds of various websites. How could Scintilla (check what the term scintillation refers to, it is a good name) be harmonized with other products of the NPG, like Postgenomic, Connotea, Nature Network…is a future question. For me it seems that the developers would like to convince me to use Scintilla feeds (in the long run) instead of Google Reader feeds when the content is about science in general and in details. The key word is personalization and personal filtering and in that respect maybe it is worth to think of Google’s personalized search trials and web history. More info (including the mail of Euan Adie, developer): Scintilla and Scintilla brings personalization to science
In my opinion the Google of science publishing is the umbrella brand Nature Publishing Group. The best indicator of it is the growing number of freshly released beta products making NPG web initiatives a heaven for scientific early adopters. As Timo Hannay, web editor of Nature said in an interview in Spiegel: The core business of Nature is not to produce a magazine,” he says, “but to facilitate the exchange of ideas among scientists.” Indeed, Nature is technologically a step ahead of other publishers in many respects. Let’s take a look at other giant science journals’ websites. (OK, marketing blablah is over, I am not paid for this, I am just simply enthusiastic about the progress.)
I positioned myself here as the Biotech Geek Blogger with an ideal target audience of researchers and IT guys curious about BT things. A clever and fast scientist turned entrepreneur once called me a Google Biotechnologist. Now I realized a bit lately that the niche Google of my profession is called Nature.
I always wanted to participate in a professional group-blog and I had some opportunities in the past. Now I was offered to contribute freely to the Nature Stem Cell Reports‘s new blog The Niche. What could I say?
Yes. (And I won’t be the only one.) It is a huge opportunity for a rookie stem cell researcher like me and an ideal way to get in touch with the recent literature and regmed happenings, continuously process it and make it digestible to other people. The agreement is: concerning articles prepared specifically for The Niche, full blog posts will be published there, while excerpts will be published here. Read the rest of this entry »
In the 2007 proof-of-concept paper, entitled A Pocket-Sized Convective PCR Thermocycler, authors Nitin Agrawal, Yassin A. Hassan, and Victor M. Ugaz wrote:
at home is a main motivation behind hacking. A Harvard Chemistry Research Group now 
In the last couple of weeks I became heavily interested in 
At least I know what I will read on the plane over at the Atlantic tomorrow back to old Europe: Bubble City by Aaron Swartz. What by who? Bubble city is a blog tech novel with chapters as posts. The story takes place in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley around a startup called Newsflip going deep into current web techniques, startup happenings, Google trends & types and tokens of people with the tools of fiction. It is well written, it is witty, I’ve just started but quickly became excited about it due to its experimental character and the insider angle of the writer behind. Bubble City is the brainchild of Aaron Swartz 
Components from top to bottom:
After a hard experimental week (I have now around 55 T-75 or T-175 flasks with 6 different growing cell lines in the incubator) finally I have been able to turn a little weekend attention to move a step further with my home electronics “maker” plan. Instead of buying a 
I like 
The 
