Rough hack ideas for Science Hack Day Boston 2015 

 

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! Need ideas? Browse some of the ideas from previous Science Hack Days or check out the ongoing list of science-related APIs, datasets and useful programming tools/frameworks.

 

Need a place to stay on the night of Saturday, January 24th (since we won't have the Media Lab overnight)? Are you local and have a spare couch? Check the bottom of the page! 

 

Hack ideas

Example title Dynamic Note Taker Automatically generate crochet patterns from protein structures Foldscope (paper microscope) Browsing in your personal bibliography network Build a 2D BioPrinter Iterate on a Science/Coding learning app Myo + JMol (or similar viewer) Climate Feedback: create a database of climate change press coverage credibility evaluations Overnight arrangements

---

Example title

 

Add a few descriptive sentences here! Please keep it short and sweet, but you can link to other resources.

 

Hackers: 

• Hacker name, email, twitter username
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username 

---

 

Dynamic Note Taker

 

A dynamic platform that parses your notes to provide information from other knowledge and data sources such as wikipedia, wolframalpha, edX, and others!

 

Hackers: 

• George Sun
  email: mr_sunny@mit.edu 
• David Wang
  email: wangd3@gmail.com  

 

---

Automatically generate crochet patterns from protein structures

 

I've been playing around with making soft, cuddly (as much as that's possible) protein structures, but it would be awesome to make this easier for anyone to do, with any protein they want! .pdb define the 3D structure of proteins, and in their headers they have lines of text that specify where the secondary structure goes along the amino acid chain. It would be wonderful to create a little web tool (javascript?) that would accept/fetch a .pdb file and spit out a crochet pattern, which is essentially just a transformation of that secondary structure information. Any other enhancements/ideas would be great to hear too!

 

Hackers: 

• Jessica Polka, jessica.polka@gmail.com, @jessicapolka
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username 

 

---

Foldscope (paper microscope)

 

The foldscope is an amazing, low-cost microscope made out of paper by the Prakash lab at Stanford (see TED talk here). I'll bring a beta unit and we can post our results to the community. It would be especially great to create a tutorial for something that hasn't been done with the foldscope before (not clear to me that timelapse has been done?)

 

Hackers: 

• Jessica Polka, jessica.polka@gmail.com, @jessicapolka
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username 

 

---

 

Browsing in your personal bibliography network

 

How to find the relevant literature for your research project? How to find the work by X which is relevant to your project Y? Any overlap between papers X and Y which would lead to new research directions? All these questions are often answered utilizing the network of articles we know of, a list of papers connected by citations. Although a lot of effort is necessary to develop such a network, it is rarely exploited systematically. Which this hack could change!

 

The idea is to visualize the network of a personal bibliography and use this information to personalize literature searches on the web (such as on pubmed). First ideas for use cases and visualization exist, as do personal bibliographies. Anybody from scientists to designers to developers could contribute to make this a fun and potentially really useful hack!

 

Hackers: 

• Wolfram Moebius, @WolframMoebius
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username 

 

 

---

Build a 2D BioPrinter

 

A few summers ago, I started working on building a bioprinter out of some used CD drives, an inkjet printer, and an Arduino, but as the time went on, the project fell by the wayside. I'm reviving it for BSHD 2015, and I want your help! I've already done most of the labor-intensive work, but I still need help writing code to get it operating and troubleshooting some issues it's been having. My hope is that with some help from fellow hackers, we can get it up and running by the end of the week. I made a short blog post about what I've done so far and what needs to be done along with a picture so you can see what I'm talking about. I worked with this instructable as a blueprint.

 

If you've worked with 3D printers or Arduino before, I'd love to get your input and work with you! Please leave comments if you think there's something that I should bring to the hack day. I'll bring everything that I've used, and I would be more than happy to purchase some parts or electronics.

 

Hackers: 

• Dan Burkhardt, dburkhar@umass.edu, @dbburkhardt
• Ted Pudlik, tpudlik@gmail.com 
• Will Sutton wsutton17@gmail.com 
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• It would be interesting to use this to test the range of cross-species bacterial inhibition - is this a "color" printer? - Jessica @jessicapolka
• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username 

 

---

 

 

Iterate on a Science/Coding learning app

 

Currently, this free webapp (with source code here) is in a somewhat-usable stage, but could use a lot of work to become better. Either more features could be built (it's built on the MEAN stack which is pretty standard), or some code could be refactored (it's sadly somewhat spaghetti), or more content could be added.

 

Hackers: 

• Edward Kim, @eddotman
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username 

 

---

Myo + JMol (or similar viewer)

 

I recently got Thalmic's Myo armband - the default apps are okay, but it would be cool to build a way to manipulate molecular/crystal viewers with motion control. I have a dev account, so SDK access isn't a problem - but I haven't yet tinkered with their API so it'd be working from ground-up. Should be fun though!

 

Hackers: 

• Edward Kim, @eddotman
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username 

 

---

Climate Feedback: create a database of climate change press coverage credibility evaluations

 

The Climate Feedback project ambitions to help citizens evaluate the trustworthiness of climate change information in online media.

 

Scientists are planing to use the Hypothesis web-annotation browser plug-in to comment on the scientific accuracy of news articles directly alongside targeted influential articles. They will also summarize the essence of their critical commentary in the form of a simple article-level overall credibility rating for readers to instantly assess the article's credibility (the initiative is explained on Salon.com). These annotations will help willing journalists to improve the accuracy of their coverage by providing connection to relevant scientific information and experts.

 

In this Science Hack event, we will create a web platform that will gather the database of all the scientists' annotations and use this database to build a live analysis of journalists, editors and newspapers' scientific credibility.

 

Hackers: 

• Emmanuel, @gypsci
• Ty
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments:

 

---

Flapper for Your Crapper
We have the technology, we know we can can augment the fluid surface tension (http://lifehacker.com/5838738/how-to-eliminate-poop-splash-with-toilet-paper) but we have technology, web 2.0 is here, how about toilet 2.0.  This is based on ideas from three science hack day participants who feel that by reducing toilet bowl splash when going #2 helps the prevention of pathogens transmission lurking in restrooms and bathrooms not to mention the shiverybos2015ideas feeling you get when the droplets of water bounce up and hit you in the behind. 

 

Here is the live prototype demo tested today.  The devise consists of rubberized shield that prevents water from splashing up from toilet bowl.  It is adjustable based on bowl shape and can easily augmented current toilet bowl cross sections.  A Standard pressure sensor gauge tie into a Arduino indicates 'go' - 'no go' on the passage of the waste product and the initial test is seen here the http://youtu.be/4g2Jw317des.

 

Hackers: 

• Andrew Mosedale, andy@moseis.com, @amosedale @techmosedale
• ...and jump in!

 

Comments: 

• Commenter Name, Email, Twitter Username

 

 

Potato Science - Who Knew?

Cindy Mosedale, cindy_mosedale@yahoo.com, @cindy_mosedale

From the lowly seed to: asexual reproduction, budding, photosynthesis and the production of glucose and its transformations into cellulose (structure) and starch (energy), both polymers of glucose. Starch - amylose dissolves and amylopectin expands in cooking as the cell becomes turgid and swells. Stretch out and spread the starch grains but do not break the cell walls which would release them and create sticky - mush. Instead after potatoes are boiled to tender, drain water, let cool, add milk and butter to space cells with casein proteins. Further enhance flavor by keeping the potatoes steamy 9enhances olfactory experience) and stimulating other senses on the tongue, such as: sour/sour cream, salt/salt, umami/Parmesan cheese/pepper, sweet/potato,  fat/milk+butter, sour/sour cream. The art and science of potatoes...who knew?

 

 

 

Overnight arrangements

 

Need a place to stay on the night of Saturday, January 24th (since we won't have the Media Lab overnight)? Are you local and have a spare couch? Add your name here!

 

Need a place to stay: 

• name, email, twitter username
•  

 

Have a place to stay: 

• Wolfram Moebius, @WolframMoebius
• Ted Pudlik, tpudlik@gmail.com
•