Dr. Andrea Lucky and her team bring us a pretty interesting crowd sourced experiment on picnics most feared enemy, ants. All you have to do to take partis collect some ants from an urban environment (Apparently pecan sandies are the optimal bait for this purpose), send them in to Dr. Lucky and her team will identify the species (e.g. Solenopsis...

  PLOTS continues to impress with the quality and accessibility of their work. The software suite they just released to accompany their $30 spectrometer is much nicer than anything i’ve seen packaged with “research” grade specs. PLOTS Spectral Workbench is the client software for the video spectrometer, and can be found here: https://github.com/jywarren/spectral-workbench It is in alpha, though with some configuration...

Researchers filled a Giant Ant colony full of concrete to reveal the amazingly complex structure below. Of course, they probably could have used ground penetrating radar to accomplish the same thing without wiping out the ants. Via Richard Martyniak via Boing Boing

Gel electrophoresis is a core technique used in molecular biology laboratories.  The gels used for electrophoresis are almost always agarose which is a polysaccharide purified from agar-agar.  Agar-agar is obtained from red algae and contains a variety of impurities along with the agarose.  Agar-agar is often used as a substitute for gelatin in vegetarian dishes and is used to...

Howdy Citizen Scientists, Yesterday was the final day of our kickstarter campaign for Issues 03/04. And financially it was unsuccesful. We needed $5k to cover print costs and only raised $978. I don’t believe this was a result of people not wanting to support what we are up to. But more a failing on my part to get the...

  The protocol I use for collecting human DNA samples requires tubes to be vortexed for 10 minutes.  Standing around for a sixth of an hour is not my idea of fun so I decided to get a foam tube holder.  Unsurprisingly a piece of foam with holes in it costs 50 dollars.  As per my usual I wanted...

If you’re like me, and can’t draw a straight line much less an accurate 3D representation of a structure, OpenSCAD is the cad software for you. Rather than require a patient and steady hand like most CADs all you need is a bit of scripting and walla 3D model. P.s. For those who like drawing and not scripting, there...

 Intent to Compete forms open The Prize: Empowering Personal Healthcare The Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE is a $10 million global competition to stimulate innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies, making reliable health diagnoses available directly to “health consumers” in their homes. The dire need for improvements in health and healthcare in the U.S. has captured the attention of...

If you havent heard of Aerogel, it really is quite an amazing substance. Its a gel thats had its liquid component replaced by gas. This results in a cool material that is both low in density and thermal conductivity.  

Glow in the dark yoghurt is something that has been floating around the DIYbio community for a while now, though to my knowledge no one has actually made a batch. Hopefully that will change now that Cathal Garvey of IndieBiotech has released a “Beginners” guide to hacking yoghurt. As you can see from the excerpt below beginner here is...