As a biologist with a 3D printer, one of the questions I get most often about 3D printed parts is, “Can you autoclave these things?” As it turns out, no, not really. There are only a handful of thermoplastics that can survive the autoclave process, and most of them are not very good for 3D …
Alex Pasternack at Vice.com’s Motherboard channel has some very interesting thoughts on domes. Giant, massive, city-bestriding domes, starting with the Great Stink Dome of Hangzhou, which was erected to contain vapors emanating from the site of a former insecticide factory. Pasternack’s article discusses some of the fascinating history related to the idea of dropping domes …
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has posted a gallery of satellite measurements of nitrogen dioxide, taken by the Aura spacecraft. The results show a clear, nation-wide decline in this type of air pollution from 2005 to 2011. There are a lot of contributing factors for the reduction. This period includes the beginning of the Great …
A few days ago, the FDA began issuing citations to cheese makers in New York State for the use of wooden shelves and boards for aging cheese, a practice that is permissible by state law and has been used for hundreds of years. Not surprisingly, this made a lot of people pretty angry. A Whitehouse.gov …
I’m proud to announce that the sample collection for the building science component of Project MERCCURI is complete! In early May, Koichi Wakata from JAXA (Japan’s space exploration agency) collected swabs swabs of surfaces aboard the International Space Station. Back in June last year, Jenna, Wendy and I went to the Johnson Space Center in …
I’m working on a manuscript describing the different and particular challenges scientists in various disciplines face when incorporating citizen science into their research. So, I thought I would go looking for other articles about it, and found one with the promising title A new dawn for citizen science by Jonathan Silvertown. I’m holed up in …
Not actually Danish chickens. (cc-by-nc river seal)One of the most coveted chores at my high school was to feed our school’s chickens. The chickens provided eggs for the students, faculty, staff and our extensive Meals on Wheels program. I always thought it was the best chore assignment you could ask for; the hen house had …
In a a new study (also covered by Smithsonian.com), researchers placed 572 bags of leaf litter in 20 sites within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and found that rates of decomposition varied by as much as 40%, correlating with the level of radioactive contamination at the site. The authors suggest that this is a worrying development, …
In my last two posts I described the process of developing the microbial growth experiment we will be running aboard the International Space Station. We’ve tackled growth assays on 96-well plates in zero gravity, at least in theory. How well will this actually work on aboard the space station? To find out, Jenna, Wendy and …
Microtiter plate readers are often used for measuring optical density in liquid media, and this is what we were planning to do. However, they are general purpose, programmable instruments, and there’s no rule that says you have to use them this way. It occurred to me that all of our problems stemmed from the difficulties …