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Got an idea for a science hack? Got a brainwave for a mashup? Add it below. If you see an idea you'd like to hack/collaborate on, add your name to it!
Ready to submit your project? Enter it here: http://j.mp/sciencehacks
Hack Ideas:
- Graveyard Orbit Satellite Directory
- Cards Against Science (a Cards Against Humanity variant)
- Journal of Brief Ideas
- Ghost Heart in a Jar!
- Steam distillation of essential oils
- Turn-key cloud chamber
- 3D displays of Feynman diagrams and Large Hadron Collider collision events
- Using the HDF5 data format to distribute particle physics data
- Creating a viewing interface for synchrotron operating statuses
- Science journalists' dictionary
- Tissue: Visualize local network traffic
- PIE POLITICS - Political Intelligence Engine -> Visualize Government
- EEG - Brain Attention Games and Exploration
- Personal Planetarium
- Server/Mobile App for FDA Drug Data
- Animal Tracking in the Academy
- Inspirational Furniture
- 3D Sea Slugs - Soft bodied marine invertebrate 3D imaging technology
- Program ourselves by observing and automatically acting on quantified self data
- PeerLibrary - Open scientific knowledge
- Darwin, the Poet - interactive genetic algorithm that produces meaningful poetry through random mutation + selection
- Punkulele: Robo-Uke
Example Title: This is just a template!
Example description of just a few short sentences goes here. Keep it brief!
Hackers:
- Your Name, Your Twitter and/or Email (so people can reach you)
- ...and jump in!
Comments
- Include your name, your twitter and/or email.
Animal Tracking in the Academy
I have some hardware and software that can track positions over a large area that forms the basis of an music/video/LED art installation I've put together. I'm thinking that some of that could be repurposed to track movement of animals or fish and then use the output to drive ambient music (via Ableton Live, Max/MSP, Supercollider, or other music programs) and possibly drive some generative video (from Processing, Java, Jitter, or other).
I have the cameras, but the software I have for tracking poeple in the installation won't cut it for this job, so we'd need to do some computer vision (or some simple hack that gets the job done) to get the fish/animal input. Then, we can have separate modules that receive the position data in real time and do whatever with it -- make music, video, shine laser, light LEDs, whatever...
Lots of area to help out with this ranging from hardware stuff, software (could be any of C++, Matlab, and Java), visualization, ...
PS: Was originally also thinking of visitor tracking, but aiming cameras at the unsuspecting public creates some privacy issues ...
Hackers:
- Brent Townshend
- Vanessa Li - I might be able to assist with some C++/Matlab/audio stuff (vanessa.li@gmail)
- Maria Cordell - Sounds interesting. I've done similar stuff in Jitter. mcordell@gmail.com, @mcordell
- ...and jump in!
Comments:
Server/Mobile App for FDA Drug Data
Thousands of people die every year from adverse drug interactions, and tens of thousands more are hospitalized or made sick by them.
I want to take publicly available drug warning labels from the FDA and make them quickly and easily searchable via both web and mobile app. Then, when either you or a loved one experiences a side effect, or is perscribed a new drug, user can quickly and easily look up the data from anywhere.
Personal Planetarium
I have a dream to make a personal planetarium. Basically it looks like an umbrella. But on the inside is a small pico projector. I have the small projector and the umbrella (plus a few to fiddle with) and I know how to do the planetarium content.
Here's where I'm stuck. I need help figuring out how build a fisheye lens of some sort. Also, figuring out how to make a small enough PC computer playback rig that would neatly fit on the umbrella structure. So if I teamed up with someone that knows about optics and someone who can build a small lightweight PC we'd be set.
There's another option I have no materials to explore but would be cool. That's using digital paper on the inside of the umbrella. I don't have any digital paper to experiment with but it would eliminate the need for the projector and reduce the power requirements.
Application? There's lots of free planetarium content however most schools don't have access to a planetarium. So if I can invent a small personal dome there's a way for these students to access the content.
Challenges for any planetarium:
a) Getting a bright enough image from a projector (the pico is just 85 lumens)
b) Keeping display area dark enough. I'm just using black fabric to create this at the moment.
c) Lens distortion and image coverage, most planetariums use several projectors and blend them. Since my throw distance is short and my display surface small it's a bit easier to get coverage in my current rig.
Hackers:
- Kira Hammond, I work in the Science Visualization studio at the California Academy of Sciences.
-
Comments:
- Hi Kira, this could be fun -- I spoke with Matt G. about it a bit at the meetup last night. What kind of Pico do you have and I'll see if I can figure out a fisheye lens for it. Also, was thinking of other possibilities using a servo-controlled laser instead of a projector -- more of an automated star pointer than a planetarium, basically automating the laser pointers used by guides when doing outdoor star-gazing. Could also create a printed star chart and a steered laser driven by star software (such as Starry Night). In any case, can think of supplies that might be needed in advance and brainstorm a bit more... -Brent
Graveyard Orbit Satellite Directory
Create a visual directory on the web of the defunct satellites that are in the "graveyard orbit". Could utilize data from the "Jonathan Space Report": http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/jsr.html .
Hackers:
Comments:
Cards Against Science (a Cards Against Humanity variant)
I'm hoping to crowdsource a variant of Cards Against Humanity (see here: http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/) that anybody interested can contribute a card suggestion or three to during Saturday's hacking and then a bunch of us can play late Saturday night. I'll bring a bunch of blank 3x5 index cards that we can either print on or write on to make the cards for the game. Perhaps somebody enterprising wants to write a little bit of code that turns the set of suggestions (which we'll probably collect via a Google spreadsheet form) into printable cards. We'll probably have a physical suggestion box as well for people to add cards to the mix.
This isn't designed to take over from any other hacks but to be a supplemental hack on the side for a bit of fun for us all.
[Added] Here is a website holding space where you can add entries as of now!
Hackers:
Comments:
Journal of Brief Ideas
For an introduction to this idea, see here: http://www.physicsdavid.net/2012/02/a-journal-of-brief-ideas/
Essentially what I'd like to do is see if we can build or at least design a rudimentary online journal as an overlay on figshare using their API. The specific implementation of the journal would be the Journal of Brief Ideas to start with but could presumably be extended to create any kind of journal you wanted. If you're interested, make sure you put your name on this list because if I do have interested co-workers on this, I'll get figshare involved more directly.
Hackers:
Comments:
Ghost Heart in a Jar!
Halloween is coming up - this is the time of year when a mad scientist's mind turns to... decellularizing a pig heart! Seriously, who wouldn't want one of these in their Cabinet of Curiosities:
Decellularization is the process of stripping out all the cells from an organ, leaving only the connective tissue. The resulting "ghost organ" can then be reseeded using cells from a patient, to generate an organ that can be used for transplantation. Still lots of research to be done before this is ready for use in the clinic. In our case, we don't really want to reseed it anyway - we just want a ghost heart in a jar!
The procedure requires some knowledge of anatomy, and lots of pumping of liquid through the vasculature of the organ. The liquids used are relatively non-toxic: enzymes, detergents, salts, etc. We'll have to come up with some DIY alternatives to some of the more specialized equipment, and to replace one or two of the nastier chemicals.
I have some pig hearts lined up, and am waiting for some last reagents to arrive right now. If we can pull this off, the resulting Ghost Heart will be on display at the Cal Academy's upcoming Halloween exhibit!
Hackers:
Comments:
Steam distillation of essential oils
1. Build a steam distillation rig from scratch (here's a couple instructables to guide us: 1, 2, 3, 4)
2. Distill essential oils from herbs or orange peels
3. Bribe the judges with flavored vodka
4. ...?
5. Profit!
Hackers:
Comments:
- ...add a comment here
- ryan > I volunteer for QA
Build a turn-key cloud chamber to ``see" cosmic rays and radioactive decays
I'm a physics professor and in one of our labs, we use dry ice to build a cloud chamber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber) that allows you to see the trails left by particles coming from radioactive decays. However, the dry ice eventually sublimes away and it takes a while to get going and it's rather sensitive to environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, etc). Nothinglabs has posted directions on how to build one of these using a Peltier: a solid-state cooling device that can produce fairly cold temperatures when connected to a power source. (http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Cloud-Chamber-using-Peltier-Coolers/) This summer I had a student try to build one of these, but we had no significant success. Sigh....
However, I am not the best hardware guy and I'm hoping someone can help me! I plan on bringing equipment to build 2-3 prototypes of this cloud chamber, but I'm only concerned about going home with one! So if you can help me get this working, you can take the extra(s) home with you. :) If you're handy with electronics and patient with physical assembly, please come help me! Anyone interested in making a more legitimate container for this device (3D printer? balsa wood?) would be welcome as well! I'd really like this to be usable by our students, but I can't get it working. I hope someone can help us out.
In addition to radioactive decays, we should be able to see tracks left by cosmic rays. However, these will leave trails about once or twice a minute, on average. If we can make the cloud chamber stable for long periods of time, I'd like to experiment with using a webcam to record the tracks when they pass through. This might be quite hard, but it's something to shoot for.
I'll be coming in from NY with the bare minimum of equipment, so if you have extra goodies (circuit bread boards, multimeters, etc), please feel free to bring them.
Hackers:
Comments:
3D displays of Feynman diagrams and Large Hadron Collider collision events.
I do research with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle physics lab in Europe. When we are trying to understand how these particles interact with one another at the most basic lever, we use a pictogram shorthand called Feynman diagrams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram). These represent how the particles move in space and time, not dissimilar from how football (American) plays are diagrammed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wing-T_Power.png). The lines represent where the particles have been and where they are going.
While those diagrams allow us to describe physics at the moment of interaction, what happens in our detectors is a bit more messy. At that point we get 10s or hundreds of particles spilling out and it looks like chaos! (http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/photos/2013/03/higgs-candidate-event-hr.jpg). But when I am explaining to my students how we are performing an analysis, I am generally focused on less than 10 particles and the tracks they leave in our detector. When we do an analysis, 3D imaging can be important in explaining this work to our students because they need to picture the angles that these particles fly off at with respect to each other.
I would love some sort of kit, similar to the molecular model kits that the chemists get to use (http://www.hometrainingtools.com/molecular-model-set-large/p/CE-MODEL3/). Some way I can connect particles together at different angles and let them ``decay" into one another, so that I can better explain my work to new students. I can bring some clay and pipe cleaners to demo this, but could we put something better together? Maybe using a 3D printer? I'm no good at that kind of thing, but can you help? I think there are *a lot* of particle physicists who would really like something like this!
Hackers:
Comments:
Using the HDF5 data format to distribute particle physics data.
The particle physics community is confronting two related issues: how to preserve our data for future generations/studies and how to make our data more available for educational purposes or just interested hackers. We currently use an open-source, but in-house-written analysis software package called ROOT (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/) that has it's own data format defined. Some of us would like to put samples of our data in more widely used formats for others to use and we have in fact done that! You can download CMS data in .csv or .json data files.
But those formats are basically text and therefore are big files and can be slow to read when you want a student to work with 10's of GB of data. I would like to put some sample data in the HDF5 format. (http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/) It is a binary format being used more and more in the Big Data scientific community. There are some very nice python tools to interface with it (http://www.h5py.org/) and it seems a natural file format to try.
If you are a data wrangler, come work with me to try to get this swinging. I've barely worked with HDF5 beyond reading their examples so we can all learn together! If you don't think this is the right format, give me some other suggestions. I just want to learn!
I'll bring some sample particle physics data from the CMS experiment and I'll explain what it all means.
Hackers:
Comments:
Creating a viewing interface for synchrotron operating statuses
Synchrotron light sources typically have webpages that show their current operating statuses (e.g. beam current, shutdown mode active/inactive, etc.). The layouts of these webpages are often varied and not very "pretty" by modern web design standards. Using HTML/CSS/JS, it would be very cool to build a front-end web app that scrapes the data from other synchrotron sites and aggregrates/presents it in a nice interface.
Hackers:
Comments:
Science journalists' dictionary
Science journalists are often looking for a convenient phrase to explain some piece of jargon in just a few words. Every time they face this challenge they are repeating something done by many journalists before them. So why not try to compile a resource that collects previously used phrases as a resource for those trying to find a good match or generate their own?
The idea would be to scrape a body of science news articles, searching for the key word plus some following (or preceding) phrase in apposition. These phrases might be automatically identifiable by being offset by commas, or in some common syntactical structure that could be close to automated, just needing a human to eyeball the search results to select the one correctly identified.
The hack would be to try to generate a search engine on science news texts plus an interface that presented possible options to add to the dictionary so that the dictionary keepers could easily approve or reject suggestions found by search.
Hackers:
Comments:
Tissue: Visualize local network traffic
Monitor and visualize local network traffic. Think: Wireshark meets d3.js without the nefarious attitude. Github here: https://github.com/econchick/tissue
Hackers:
- Lynn Root, lynn@lynnroot.com, @roguelynn
- Sebastian Porst
- ...and jump in!
Comments:
PIE POLITICS - Political Intelligence Engine -> Visualize Government
(SORRY! We had to cancel! If someone keen to pick this up, we can provide source code ping: rustyoldrake at gmail.com
Following last year's SHD (team electionbot) Ryan, Shreyas and Brian got together to bake a pie. The Political Intelligence Engine (PIE) is an exploratory project that aggregates domain-specific information in one place. In this case, we were looking to satisfy Politico's who wanted real time information on politics, hot issues, and clusters of connections.
POC: http://www.pie-politics.org/ Not complete, but give an idea of where to start. It's currently wired to UK politics, fed by tweets, but easy to repurpose to USA and broaden data inputs beyond twitter. We believe the power of the idea is the intersection of Politicians//MediaPoliticos//Issues - and the ability to gain fast insights into what's shifting national policy, and why.
One Approach (we're open to others):
- Repurpose to point to USA -> House and Senate. If federal looks well served already, state legislatures could also be considered.
- Expand inputs beyond Tweets (RSS feeds, screen scraping, public data - e.g. BLS data by congressional district)
- Expand outputs (D3 visualizations of network connections (congressmen-lobbyists-money-votes-tweets), issue-centric heatmaps, NLP on tweets
Hackers:
EEG - Brain Attention Games and Exploration
Explore attention. Specifically perhaps a game connecting measured EEG recordings to the cognitive act of attending to different spatial areas of the body.
Several years ago a respected colleague in neuroscience cited some unpublished research which suggested the capacity to pick up spatial disparities in activity on his scalp which correlated to differential topographic changes in spatially directed attention.
I've enjoyed moving attention around spatially during meditation, finding it quite useful as a practice and would like to dig into the phenomenon a bit further.
One concept is to create a game where the player moves her attention around her body as corresponding EEG readings are read. Objectives are either met or not met or quantified somehow.
A further exploration could be a sensory regime incorporating flashing LEDs on closed eyelids, known to induce geometric visual hallucinations.
Hackers:
- watson, Computational Neuroscience / Math / AI, watsonix@gmail.com
- Gautam Agarwal, Computational Neuroscience / Neuroscience
- Greg Friedland, Hardware and software hacking
- Todd Anderson, Neuroscience / hacking
- Liam Holt, Cell Biology / Science Hack Day Champion
- Jean Rintoul, wetware/software/hardware/hacking
- ...and jump in!
Comments:
Inspirational Furniture
I've used a Fitbit to log almost 6 million steps over the last 18 months. Fitbit collects my activity data and sends it to the web every 15 minutes to inspire me to be more active. But Fitbit is just a tiny little thing I'm wearing, and it's easy to ignore when I'm feeling lazy. What if my household furniture could gently let me know how I'm doing on my step goals, and give me that nudge to get off the couch and go for a walk?
The goal is to hack an existing Arduino-controlled chandelier full of individually addressable RGB LEDs, so that its color pattern is determined by the user's current daily step count. If the chandelier is red, you'd better go for a walk to get into the rainbow zone.
Hackers:
- Bonnie Barrilleaux
- ...and jump in!
Comments:
- My idea uses fitbit and is kinda related, take a look! -Steve Kryskalla
- Also, if you're interested in color, take a look at color response priming (example), really cool stuff. -Steve
3D Sea Slugs – Soft bodied marine invertebrate 3D imaging technology
Help me create the world’s first 3D printed sea slug!
I’ll bring the live sea slugs, you bring a creative mind and 3D imaging and modeling skills.
I’m interested in hacking a cheap and easy system to accurately 3D image soft bodied marine inverts, which preserves their shape, that researchers can take and use in the field. 3D technology is making it easier and faster to share scientific information globally and is helping to get kids (and adults) geeked out about science. There are techniques for 3D imaging shelled invertebrates, and new x-ray techniques being developed for 3D imaging internal anatomy. Preferably this would use a camera mounted on a stand made out of 3D printable parts that could be easily used by researchers worldwide.
This hack has many applications including accurately 3D printing animals like jellyfish and sea slugs that can be used for education. More scientifically, my graduate research involves measuring the hyperbolic geometry of nudibranchs, and comparing that to the different types of chemical defense toxins stored along the edge of their bodies (these sea slugs steal and reuse these chemicals from their prey!) to see if their unique shape can act as a predictor of the toxicity of the slugs. Practical applications? Well a lot of these chemicals have biomedical properties and are being examined in cancer and HIV research. Also, slugs are just plain cool.
Hackers:
- Shayle Matsuda Graduate Student Cal Academy-Invertebrate Zoology, smatsuda@calacademy.org
- ...and jump in!
Comments
Program ourselves by observing and automatically acting on quantified self data
Step 1: Collect personal quantified self data on: fitness (e.g. fitbit), sleep (e.g. fitbit), mood / stress (via mood survey), thoughts (via journaling), diet (via meal & calorie tracking), cognitive performance (e.g. lumosity). Step 2: Analyze the data for trends. Step 3: Using methods from scientific studies and research, prompt the user to act and (hopefully) change their behavior.
Some examples:
- Mood survey + sentiment analysis of journal shows worsening mood -> automated CBT session, automated ELIZA session
- Lack of sleep + drop in cognitive performance -> precommitment to earlier bed time, commitment contracts (a la beeminder)
- Drop in physical activity -> precommitment / commitment contract to exercise, more ideas
- Change in diet (less nutrition) -> automatically suggest meal plans, healthier alternatives to unhealthy foods you are eating
- Drop in mood or increase in stress -> show me funny cat pictures (not sure of the science on this one)
- Rewards for meeting certain criteria ("gamification", badges, achievements, etc.; e.g. habitRPG, fitbit badges)
Hackers:
- Steven Kryskalla, skryskalla@gmail.com, @lost-theory, github.com/lost-theory
- Maria Cordell, mcordell@gmail.com, @mcordell
-
- ...and jump in!
Comments
- Include your name, your twitter and/or email.
PeerLibrary - Open scientific knowledge
PeerLibrary is an open source project developing a collaborative online community where scholars and researchers can discover, read, and discuss scholarly literature all within one site. This project focuses on expediting access to publications, enabling public recordings of analysis and insights on said publications, and encouraging collaboration and openness in the development of science.
The project is still in development and we hope to move it forward during the Science Hack Day.
Hackers:
Comments
Solar Fire Project - easy-to-build solar cooking for the developing world
4 billion people cook not with gas or electricity, but by burning wood, agricultural waste, or animal dung. Solar cooking can provide a healthier, more environmentally friendly, and less costly alternative. I'm interested in designing a high-performance concentrating solar cooker that is built out of simple geometries that can be constructed locally in developing countries.
Hackers:
- Alice Yu, @yaliceme, yalice.me
Comments
Darwin, the Poet -
It is difficult for many people to grasp how random mutation plus natural selection could possibly generate biodiversity. We're going to make this idea intuitive for people of all ages and backgrounds. Inspired by Richard Dawkins' Weasel Program, we'd like to create an algorithm that evolves poetry in a non-directed way (unlike the Weasel Program), using both machine algorithms and human preferences as drivers of the selection process.
Hackers:
- Thor Muller, @tempo (thor@thormuller.com)
- Quinn Muller, @quinnmu (quinnmuller@gmail.com)
Comments
Punkulele
We're exploring the propagation of sound waves through a gaseous medium, when originating from a soprano stringed instrument as activated by an electronic agent.
We're building a robo-uke!
Hackers:
Comments
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