Try this at home by Daniel Grushkin

The next big scientific breakthrough may come from a garage, not a lab, with do-it-yourself biologists popping up everywhere. Genetic tinkerer Daniel Grushkin has a message for the curious: go ahead, try this at home. 

In the scientific journals, we’ve been labeled biotech hobbyists, citizen scientists, even biohackers.

Last December, seven of us opened the first community lab, called Genspace. Though it’s a fully functional lab, it has a decidedly hacked-together aesthetic. We built it in a Brooklyn, N.Y., warehouse that was converted into a workspace for architects and designers. At the center of the floor sits a glass cube made of found objects. The walls are created from windows and sliding glass doors saved from demo sites. The lab benches are stainless steel tables salvaged from industrial kitchens. Most of the equipment was donated by a biotech company that downsized during the economic crisis.

We incorporated Genspace as a nonprofit to serve as a shared lab, a nursery for biotech tinkerers. Our members include an entrepreneur with great ideas but a miniscule budget, an artist employing single-celled organisms for an experimental design palette, a molecular biologist with a penchant for mentorship, and folks like me, who want to learn by creating novel organisms.

My Smartphone Is A Microscope. What Can Yours Do?

From NPR:

I lied. My smartphone isn't a microscope — yet. But there are some smart physicists who want to make that transformation possible very soon, if not for you and me at first, then for doctors who don't have easy access to laboratories.

There are a lot of ways to trick out your smartphone. And if you're an eager Apple fan, the brand-new iPhone 4S will come with fancy apps that use its increasingly sophisticated camera to scan and image the world. A smartphone camera lens can measure objects, help translate words, and even tell you whether your potato chips have been caught in a food safety recall.

But Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu and colleagues at the Center for Biophotonics, Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis say a smartphone's camera lens can also serve as a microscope and a spectrometer, which both could be pretty handy for looking at blood samples.

A few years ago, Wachsmann-Hogiu was thinking about creating tools to help doctors do tests right at the site where they're caring for patients, something called "point-of-care testing."

He'd heard about bioengineer Daniel Fletcher's work developing a low-tech mobile microscope called CellScope. But Wachsmann-Hogiu was interested in making something even simpler. And he noticed that when water droplets formed on the top of his iPhone camera, they magnified the image. So he took a tiny lens — just 1 millimeter in diameter — and attached it to the phone to try to get a similar effect.