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Scientific R&D At Home?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm currently on the cusp of getting myself a new hobby and making some investments. There are a few areas that interest me greatly, from playing with EEG/ECG and trying to put together a DIY sleep lab, to astronomy, etc. I'm somewhat hesitant to get into these fields because (despite the potentially short-lived enjoyment factor) I'm not convinced they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd really like to do. I've also read quite a number of articles on 'bio hacking,' and the subject seems interesting, but it also seems futile without an expensive lab (not to mention years of experience). What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?"
See to it, Frank, see to it...
My theory is that many, man cancers and other diseases have infectious components and, even may be sexually transmitted. At this rate, I'm going to flipping live forever.
Do what you enjoy first, and the money will come. (For example, it may just be marketing cheaper ways to do an expensive hobby) If you chase the money first, you can forget the enjoyment. Also, you may want to read http://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mondays-Yourself-Revolutionary/dp/0385522525
Robotics is always interesting. Servo motors are pretty easy to control, once you learn a little microcontroller programming. All you need is a basic understanding of algebra; write a few timing loops and angle-to-pulse-width conversion routines and you're there. (I've been using PIC16 microcontrollers, which do this sort of thing nicely.)
Besides, that way, you'd have a good chance of being among the first to officially welcome our new robotic overlords!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Just stick with instructables.com until you can wire up a 555 timer from radioshack before you think your going to be the next Herbert J. Farnsworth.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
The prime frontier is in software. New concepts and applications based upon scientific discoveries are all over the world of software.
Only a few hundred planets outside the solar system have been discovered. Some of those were found from backyards by amateurs.
Check out The Sky is Your Laboratory by Robert Buckheim. It's a ~$30 book that will show you how you can participate in meaningful astro research with no equipment beyond a stopwatch for the simplest stuff. Later chapters get increasingly complex and show you how to do things that be pretty big contributions to the field.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Now that I think about it, doing "real science" at home would be quite an interesting, nay, awesome hobby. A hobby community doing (anonymous) peer review and mutual reproduction of results. Maybe putting a few urban myths to rest.
And you could include schools in that, there is probably a lot of stuff out to discover which requires keep observation, measurement and then perhaps the help of a statistician to help sort the data. Counting number of animals and species in different kinds of gardens (all kept clean, lot of exotic plants, with a fish(less) pond etc.), dental caries vs. preferred school meal/drink, oh, and repeating the rats on drug experiment Rat Park - providing free heroin to rats has a remarkably unintuitive outcome. And schools collaborating nationwide and thus getting a large enough sample size could probably dig up something really remarkable. To say nothing of the large term effects wrt. science literacy.
Einstein didn't have a lab. His lab was his brain, and his "thought experiments" were obviously productive.
...that you're more interested in the recognition than the achievement. Most folks I know who make real breakthroughs in a discipline are genuinely interested in the discipline.
I occasionally teach and mentor in a doctorate program, and my essential observation is that those who are interested in the topic have a higher probability of finishing than those who are "chasing the paper". Even those of the latter category who finish the program eventually find such a perspective catches up with them in the workplace or in academia.
I don't mean to sound trollish here, but you need to search your motivations and go for the thing that really interests you. That'll render reward far past achieving 'just something, anything' And that motivation will overcome obstacles such as home-based, etc. You'll find a way, if it interests you...
... lab, to astronomy, etc....
You totally picked the wrong optical hobby dude. Unless you live in some sort of paradise, its either going to be too cold, too hot, too rainy, too buggy, too cloudy, too windy for lightweight mounts, or bad temp inversions, about 99% of the time. Now, a microscope, on the other hand, maybe with a cam attachment hooked up to a PC, with some image analysis software, that could be big fun under any weather condition. And they both cost about the same, less than a car payment for junk, about a single monthly mortgage payment for the good stuff, and about one decent used car for used pro-grade hardware.
Also, we all look at the same sky. That means intense competition. But we all have different dirt and ponds. Yet another vote for microscope.
I'm not convinced they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd really like to do.
Yeah well you're about to learn the hard part is not deciding what to buy, or even whipping out a credit card, the hard part is figuring out how you'll determine its something new. Pretty easy if you want to discover something new to you, look, an algae species I've never photographed before. Pretty hard if you want to darn near prove a negative, prove no human being has ever photographed that particular species of algae before.
Something New is not necessarily discovering a new individual thing. Something New might be using yer computer and some homemade software that emulates a red blood cell counter to chart the population of algae per sample vs ... something, to make interesting predictions, or discover a new effect. Or turning your computer-microscope into the worlds weirdest spectrophotometer, to measure ... something.
What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?
On the other hand, one good thing about the astronomy hobby is the AAVSO, American Association of Variable Star Observers. You'd never guess that their URL happens to be:
http://www.aavso.org/
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
As far as serious "science" might I suggest this -- while groundbreaking research is mostly hi-tech requiring expensive equipment, one thing that doesn't get done much anymore is well within reach: verifying or debunking claims about various products. This can range from, say, taking time lapse photos of -- oh, I don't know, the progress of competing wart removers -- to basic qualitative chemical analysis of product ingredients (is that fish oil actually mercury-free).
Another idea might be designing coffee table doodads that show off scientific phenomena or engineering tricks.
Someone had to do it.
The probability of you making a significant discovery at home is close to zero. That is not meant to disencourage you. I spent enough time in professional labs myself to know that you can work for years on end on a scientific topic professionally without making any significant discoveries. However, home science is fun, so, by all means, go ahead with it! Just don't choose your field on the vague possibility of discovering something of greater meaning, just pick something that is actually FUN to you.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Just get a telescope, and there are alot of websites with people posting that could get you into it. I'm not sure where you live tho, becucase there could be a lot of light polution in your area. If your not too close to a big city, that that would be the easiest thing to get started with, hell you could just start off with a $20 pair of binoculars and then go up from there. Just remember if you discover something new, then you can name it after yourself or what ever you want. Only like 15% of the the total sky is surveyed, so it's not that hard to find something new.
I suggest signing up for a course or two at a local community college. Even if you already know most of the stuff they'll teach, you'll get access to all their equipment and labs. You'll also meet some people that are interested in similar things as you. I've known people that take the same course for years for this exact reason.
I would suggest you check with your local university or public research institution to see who is involved in fields that interest you. You may be able to catch a talk where they say something like "I have found XYZ but I don't have a way to monitor or experiment on BCD", where you may be able to find an angle that you can assist with.
If you read into the history of Medtronic (and the pacemaker itself) you'll find that their beginnings weren't too far from what I just described - an inventor with an interest working with a physician researcher with a need.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's great that you'd like to tinker around and play with stuff at home. You may learn some things, and it will definitely present with some interesting engineering problems. But true scientific R&D, where you discover something new, forget about it for the most part.
The only domains where a lone tinkerer can still make an impact and "discover" something new is in pure math, or algorithmic research. And even there, it's a rare thing.
The days of the lone researcher are long since past, if they ever really existed in modern history. Sure during the Renaissance and through the 1800s and early 1900s a lone researcher could discover/invent something new. However, even during the latter part of the aforementioned time period, the individuals in questions (Maxwell, Faraday, Watt, Bell, etc) often had years/decades of experience and/or education in the fields they made discoveries in. And the myth of the lone inventor during this latter part wasn't really true, for example Edison had a large lab full of employees for his research.
In the contemporary time period, it's HIGHLY unlikely (I'm just reluctant to say impossible). All the low level hanging fruit in most fields has been mined. There's a reason that PhDs take a long time, there's a lot to learn and catch up on. Also, most discoveries, especially in basic science ( Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy) require lots of expensive capital equipment and labs to do. And often, it's not just one scientist, but an entire team of collaborators working on a problem from many different angles.
Now, there may be some interesting inventions/engineering solutions a lone inventor can PERHAPS come up with, but they wouldn't be new scientific discoveries. Also, as another refinement of my point, there are some things an individual can still do, like say perhaps discover a new species, but not in their backyard (unless you live in Brazil). Even then, you need a commitment of resources and time to explore the still hidden parts of the world, in the rainforest, or deep under the sea.
So, while the concept of the lone scientist is romantic, exciting and inspiring, in the modern era it's unrealistic in my opinion.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I do research into high IP3 HF receiver front ends, other radio hams are working with software defined radios, recovering digital signals from noise, DSP chips and even the way the brain perceives sound.
Ganty HA5RXZ
No, seriously, you can do it at home--get a ham radio license and start doing some experiments aimed at better understanding the behavior of the ionosphere (which is a plasma) and it's effects on radio wave propagation. No only could you make a significant contribution to science, you could have some fun in the process.
Here's the first in a series of articles on the topic. You might find it interesting.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Seriously, they have some great biological modules to investigate ;)
Sorry, home science is now an arrestable offense.
Plus sharks; there are quite a few rather small species, you can start with those.
One that hath name thou can not otter
What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home?
Chatroulette and Remote Web Cam Control are really big right now.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
One of the benefits of a home lab is raising the general level of your science literacy. There's a large gap between the cursory understanding scientific method - science in the consumer sense - and doing science - science from the producers perspective. Don't do it for the fame. Do it for the humility.
Mathematics. Field is huge, and generally all you need is a pen and paper, and sometimes a computer :). Works for me.
Not really into the money part but the hybridization of cannabis is an enjoyable past-time. And working out new analogues of common drugs is fun too.
Get your hands on some smoke detectors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
I'm not a fan of solar energy . . . the sun doesn't always shine . . . and wind? Think tornadoes. Water power? Take a look at Poland right now; that's what water will get you.
Actually, I'm a big fan of the underdog geothermal energy. Just drill down deep enough, and it gets mighty hot there. But I guess geothermal isn't fashionable enough . . . unless you live in Iceland.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In the late 1980s I worked for a biomedical company (BMSI) in Silicon Valley that made EEG equipment. They stored the EEG waveforms on a video tape. The image on the video tape had the EEG waveforms from 16 head sensors on the left of the screen and an image of the patient on the right. Patients would try to get 100% disability checks for life by claiming to be epileptic. They would spend a night in a monitored sleep lab, and then do a little horizontal dance while pretending to be asleep. Our equipment matched the brainwave recording to the image of the patient twitching to verify or disprove nocturnal epilepsy.
It doesn't really matter that you can or can't do real high-level research at home on DIY equipment. It only matters that you can build calibrated and reliable medical equipment that delivers accurate results at a small fraction of the cost of the equipment used in American hospitals. As we all know, the US medical health care system is collapsing. The recent legal reforms are basically meaningless and consist mostly of administrative and billing changes. If you can do a $1500 sleep apnea test or overnight EEG recording on DIY equipment for $50, then you are a welcome and honored member of the new health care system that is self-generating now underneath the bloated, corrupt, and crumbling official health care system.
Just be discreet at the present time.
By the way, instead of digitizing and storing the EEG waveforms directly, do a FFT on 1024 samples. The EEG waveform is basically sinusoidal so it can be recreated mathematically. Determine the formula that will regenerate the recorded waveform sample, and only store the offsets and co-efficients of the sine wave formula that will recreate that segment of the waveform accurately. You will get a 1000-to-1 data compression and be able to get all the circuitry into a hand-held small package.
First: Look up Forest Mims III and research his life story and the things he tells people. He is totally encouraging. Don't let his creationist thinking scare you. (I'm not a creationist either, but if you want to learn things in the world, you have to be able to work with difference.)
Second: Unless you're a natural, you're going to need some personal (re-)training, most likely, about how to think about acting, creativity, invention, business, and so on; Be on the lookout for it. Investigate different scenes to find personal contacts, research, and perpetually experiment. You can totally do this, but you'll want someone who can answer your questions and make a personal connection with you, an emotional connection.
Third: Not directly what you're going for, but perhaps something you might want to consider -- forming or joining a society for performing such work? Research Bucketworks for an example. There's a group doing DIY/DIWO bio lab research in the LA area. In Seattle, there is Jigsaw Renaissance. There are lots of more special purposed groups as well out there.
CS is an awesome field for this because you don't need expensive equipment, you can run all your experiments on a single computer. Not only that, it's a young field, so you can get to the cutting edge of the field really easily (compared to something like antiquities studies, where you have to go 8 years post-doc before you're likely to come up with something new, they've been working on it for thousands of years, after all).
For example, for me, for the past few years I've been focusing on artificial intelligence, as in, figuring out the algorithm for how the brain works.
Another thing I've wanted to work on is figuring out if P=NP or not.
Another thing is figuring out the best way to teach programming to beginners (I even have my name on a paper in that field, for whatever it's worth)
Another thing that is relatively easy to do, and likely to get you published (which is kind of fun), is a wordprinting program on Shakespeare's works or some other works of disputed authorship.
On the more programming side, there are a number of things to do, for example, build a program to display all the temperatures taken in the world, along with pictures of the thermometers (apparently some guy went around and took pictures of them all). Show visually how the global temperature is taken.
Some of these are obviously really hard, but sometimes it's better to go for something hard that you really want to do. As the quote says, "shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll have landed among the stars." Even if you don't figure it out, you'll have learned something and pushed your limits.
Qxe4
Biology is more promising, with many opportunities to discover new types of insect in your neighbourhood - or even in your garden. The hours are long, but any discovery has to be earned.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If you're mainly interested in learning new stuff for fun I would strongly advise you to try macrophotography. It does not have to be that expensive, and it is very fascinating to look or document insects and small things in a way that very few people actually get to experience.
You can get some really nice setups for very little money if you look at some diy projects.
Depending on where you live/travel you might even contribute to scientific discoveries :)
Seriously, aerodynamics lends itself well to this. Especially if you're going to do model airplanes. It's not all that expensive to get setup, and you're working with really low reynolds numbers, which is something that'll interest many people because of the search for small flying machines (drones, messenger bots, etc). Couple that with research for an autopilot mechanism and you've got a serious hobby that'll take time and lead to new discoveries without taking all that much money to get new results.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Build a working ternary computer, everything ternary.
Balanced Ternary will get you started. Electronics is entirely up to you. (if you even go near it, you can build it in software just as proof-of-concept)
Demo it at some electronics meetings, hope someone is feeling a little happy and bham, hopefully they'd maybe even help fund you.
I'd die to see Ternary Computing come along. Binary, admittedly simpler, is nowhere near as good as a ternary computer could be if done right.
Ternary simplifies a lot of other operations as well, such as error correction.
Let's not forget that it could emulate Binary pretty well too.
Biology is certainly an interesting one to work with.
But for the love of god secure that room to hell and back.
And in case you create some sort of insanity / extreme hunger virus (aka real life zombies), make sure you have in place a system that destroys all particles in the air.
Admittedly this will suck hard for you since you will either be a zombie, or suffocate while in the process.
Experiment with genetic engineering, try to make some interesting bacteria that could do something useful. Or generally just try and screw around with them to make interesting bacteria and wage war between several species to see who wins.
Also, see Kurtz
This one isn't recommended.
If anything, declare you are making a lab so they can come around and inspect to make sure that it is leak-proof.
Generally anything with electronics. Come up with interesting circuits for whatever.
I doubt you'd figure out something new, but you never know.
You could try playing around with radio to figure out more efficient ways of transmission.
You could always play around with some fringe science. There is still a lot of unknowns out there.
But again, just make sure you take some precautions and know exactly what you are doing (doing, fringe, oh the annoyance) because things could go tits up and you might get hurt.
Go, do it in the name of Walter!
Everyone who is a close friend of mine has these sorts of hobbies. My closest friend has built a complete sleep lab in his home, complete with a sensory isolation tank. This is just part of an extended effort on his part to more fully understand and explore his dreaming and other alternate states of mind.
In my opinion the most interesting things going on now are in biology and that's sort of home lab I am building.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
First of all, everything previous posted about doing what you love is true. Figure out what you love first.
And the way to do that is to put yourself in a situation where you can't do anything for long periods. Take a 2-week vacation somewhere w/o internet access and little interaction with others - camping, for instance. It takes a couple of days for your mind to finish processing your daily routine and calm down, but once that's over your mind will naturally start to think about things you enjoy.
(Note: This is hard. You have to force yourself to not go off to get mental stimulation somewhere.)
Some specific suggesitons:
1) I strongly believe that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the subject of AI.
2) If you live near mountains, find an isolated ecological niche and catalog the species there. For instance, find a tall vertical rock cliff with niches which have captured trees and plants fallen from the top. Being essentially isolated from the larger ecology, speciation occurs at these places. Catalog the new species.
3) Go into the woods and find some sort of overhanging rock shelter - of the sort that a hunter-gatherer society might take refuge in during a thunderstorm. Do an archaeological excavation at that spot: Divide it up into rectangles using string, dig down an inch at a time and put the dirt through a sieve and see what you can find. Get any fireplace remains carbon dated.
I have my own plant tissue culture lab. I grow species that range from relatively common to being extinct in the wild. In order to do so, I have to maintain a workspace that is cleaned with a HEPA filter, run a large pressure cooker that serves as an autoclave to prepare containers of nutrient plant medium, prepare all those media, etc. In a few hundred square feet, a few hundred thousand plants are kept, some of which are grown in cultivation nowhere else.
The problem with doing R&D at home isn't that you might not get results, it is then what to do with them. It takes a large team of lawyers to defend discoveries and such. Patents are expensive, etc. Really, you might end up having to put more money and time in it than the actual R&D if you decide to share your results.
There is a reason why R&D projects generally are taken by large businesses: they have time and money to defend them. The days of buying the newest "toy" and making lots of scientific progress is over, even if you do make progress it will take far too much time and money to defend it than you probably want to do.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Replying to my own post, if you try any of the above and happen to find anything interesting, I'd love to hear about it.
Contact me through my homepage link, on the title of the post.
There are all sorts of fantastic contributions you can make simply through daily observation. Wherever you live, nature is happening all around you, and if you are so disciplined as to make daily observations about anything over a significant length of time, you WILL contribute. There are so many factors for which there simply isn't enough solid information. Even the freaking TEMPERATURE can vary ridiculously across short distances. If you have a stellar thermometer and the resources to record that regularly, you can contribute to work done by meteorologists in the area. If you know anything about microbiology, you can study your local lake/river water - you may find something with real world implications for future generations or even just the fisherman next year. Are you into time lapse photography? Think of what you could show your community about how plants behave over time. Are you interested in publicly available growing food in your area? Making an online map of accessible food-bearing trees means creating access to a sustainable food source for a slice of your community.
And if you're into "bio-hacking", why not engage in one of the oldest bio-hacking traditions: growing edible plants. Once you have the experience to do it yourself, you can contribute to your community by sharing that experience, and, even better, helping local organizations grow food for your local food bank.
No, you won't make it into a textbook, but you definitely can create real change on a tangible level through hobbyist science.
A few years ago there was something on Nova about a New Mexico company that would rent out telescopes you can robotically control.
http://www.arnierosner.com/rent-a-scope/index.html
I'm guessing you'll get better observing conditions than where you are.
AccountKiller
Do maths : Paper, a whiteboard, a computer and there you go. The number of unsolved problems is staggering. The problems in maths are routinely solved by determined indivduals. Good luck.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
While Conway's Life has been studied to death for 40 years and some wider categories of simple rules have been studied exhaustively by others, Golly enables you to explore much wider rule sets in the quest of some that are significantly more productive that Life.
For the past 18 months I've been using it to study just one of the Generations rules which were initially surveyed, especially by Mirek Wojtowicz, around 2000. I'm focused almost entirely on Generations 345/3/6, running it on 3 machines including one added just for that purpose. But I've recently noted that 345/2/4 may be even more productive in terms of novel phenomena, although I'm not planning to switch my own research which is nowhere near finished, let alone properly reported.
Beyond that, Golly also supports RuleTable and RuleTree algorithms which allow you to try an unlimited number of new rules, a few more of which are sure to be a lot more interesting than LIfe itself.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
As part of Galaxy Zoo, I am leading a project looking at Irregular galaxies. There is masses of data available on the net under SDSS, Galex, Hubble and others. All it takes is a methodical approach to finding a data set then analysing it. We have 18,000 irregular galaxies - the biggest study to date looked at 137 of them, we have rather more. The first paper just needs some time to bring the results together. More papers will follow.
That's only partially true. Your chances of doing something interesting in physics are probably ~0, unless you have an untapped well of mathematical genius that you've failed to notice. On the other hand, biology and astronomy are fields that suffer from having truly enormous research targets. There are plenty of expensive astronomy devices pointed at objects suspected of being particularly interesting; but astronomy as a field could really use a full-sky, all-night, all-year, survey in the "dedicated amateur" range of hardware quality. You aren't going to score a nobel for elucidating the physics of novel ultradistant pulsars; but being the only person with a 10-inch reflector focused on that bit of the sky is totally doable. Whether that bit of the sky does anything useful, of course, is a matter of luck.
.5% theoretical max efficiency, or old school thermodynamics/hardcore plumbing and engineering outfits who know how to integrate thousands of meters of high pressure steam tubes in an efficient and reliable way. However, if you can come up with a better design for something that will cook dinner for under $10 in plywood, paint, and tinfoil, there's about a billion people who could stop burning down their ecosystems for charcoal...).
In Bio, you can probably discover a dozen novel microorganisms is just about any pool of slimy water large enough to drown in. You'll have to do a lot of slogging to learn enough about it to publish(if there were a faster way, grad students would be graduating faster), and you probably won't be lucky enough to find one that does anything wildly cool; but simply finding one should be doable enough. Even larger stuff like insects is pretty under-cataloged in many locations. Again, your odds of finding a particularly notable bug aren't huge; but enough slogging will almost certainly yield pictures and specimens of something that nobody has ever come up with a latinate name for. Whether this motivates you is another question; but the sample set is just so enormous that, as long as you have a decent microscope/camera, and perhaps a budget for ordering genetic sequences of stuff, a novel organism should just be a matter of effort.
Assuming you have some requisite talent, and enough budget for a decent tinkering shop, you can probably do some novel applied science/engineering(albeit probably not based on novel principles), as long as you stay away from areas of commercial interest. The field of "best approximation, for ~$100, of Thing X that normally starts at ~$20,00" has been a tinker's classic for ages. Your work won't exactly represent an advance(the usual price tag isn't just because the commercial guys are price gouging); but it may well be novel and creative. In certain cases, often being pursued by deeply underfunded NGOs, such work could even be of humanitarian significance(think solar ovens, for instance, the field of solar power is overwhelmingly dominated by semiconductor guys doing stuff with novel quantum-well fabrication in order to eke out that extra
All the low level hanging fruit in most fields has been mined.
I find it rude that you think so little of the ability of amateur scientists, but I'll chalk it up to you having a bad day.
The fruits of scientific discovery has never been low, not even when Archimedes took a bath, but what has changed is the size of the scientific community and the entrenchment of traditions. If I discover something that boggles my mind and I'm unable to quantify it to write a formal paper about it, no matter how keen my intuition or observational skills are I'll be marginalized. You find it typical that researchers are only vindicated after death, but you like som many others seem to assume that this doesn't occur today.
A certain recluse matematician comes to mind as a lone researcher, but he was far from unfamiliar with the traditions of his field. You might argue that with trees falling in the forest and listeners being lacking, making a discovery without being able to communicate it equals the abscence of science. I understand the sentiment but I'm of a mind saying that importance lies with identifying an effect as repeatable for specific reasons rather than the ability of naming it after yourself and impressing your peers with mathematical tautology.
All rites reversed 2010
After spending almost fifteen years in academic biomedical wet research I quit my position last year to work in the industry in a completely different activity. Now, in my free time (which I do have now, not like when I worked in the academia), I am doing very interesting (at least for me) in silico experimentation. I believe that there is a great potential for bioinformatics, and most biologists have no training at all in computer science, alghorithms, maths, etc. For me its great, I can do only what I really like, do not have to waste my time in the very low probability of success grant writing, no distraction in academic bureaucracy, and still produce high quality science. Of course, one of the keys for me is a great relationship with a very close scientist that still has a wet lab and no informatics skills. When we need to confirm some of the in silico findings she has the capacity to do the experiments.
In conclusion, based on my experience, team up with someone that has the capacity to generate experimental data, there a lot of biologists that are eager to work and developed new techniques to extract information from their experimental activities. Of course, for me was easy because I had the collaborators to work with and a lot of experience in the biology of the issues at study.
I am now enjoying the science that I do at home as I had never enjoyed science before, and although my discoveries are probably more limited than what you can do working at a university, they are still interesting, useful, and good contributions to the scientific knowledge.
Do what your personal interests are.
In my case it would be one of two things.
1) Breeding fish varieties for either food or profit.
I don't know if you're familiar with aquaculture, but a hardy fish that's easy to raise AND tastes good would have massive profit potential. On the fun side of things, think of the value of a guppy that looks the same as your normal guppy, but has much greater disease resistance or faster growth or more reliable color breeding or whatever. If you can tell ANY business owner that you can increase their profits substantially then you'll perk ears.
2) Computer science/programming.
Especially with artificial intelligence or studying swarm behaviors you can go a long way with just your home computer. For a low cost you can also set up your own cluster for larger scale computing.
Then there's always computer security research...
Try self-trepanning and see what's on your mind!
Three Squirrels
Doing any of these things you mention is possible, even at low cost. The key is to find something that you will find interesting on a persistent basis. Otherwise you will just collect a pile of clutter. I have a telescope and a CCD camera, but I don't use them.. why? Because I'm not wild about driving out somewhere it's dark and spending all night in the cold, to get really nice images. You need to find something that will get you up off the couch or chair (and off Slashdot) and doing it.. It's also nice if the activity can start slow and simple.. setting out to build your own scanning electron microscope is probably not the best plan. Building big Tesla coils is easier..you can start by building small ones at reasonable cost, and decide if you really want to devote your garage to it. Likewise rocketry.. you can start small and work up.
If you have a bent for signal processing, then your EEG/EKG thing might be interesting. So would building a radio camera to image things. So would sonar or radio processing (gnuradio, perhaps)?
What about robotics? glorified RC cars aren't all that interesting after the initial thrill, but things that swim or fly or wiggle or walk are much more interesting in the long run.
What about remote observation.. kite cameras etc?
Visual art has seen a shift in the last 40 or 50 years towards scientifically oriented work (from Op Art's exploration of visual phenomena to Earthwork art). In the last 20 to 30 years it has seen a turn towards project and research based work (eco art, direct action, social sculpture with an environmental bent, art that observes the cosmos), which, read in the context of the art/life blurring of boundaries, are understood as art helping to 'do the work of' science. The thing is, most art people essentially understand science as cargo cult; therefore, given some luck, panache, and interesting presentation, a moderately capable science person could 'frame' their work as an art project, and would be much more likely to receive accolades from the art world, and have their work subjected to serious (if scientifically hopeless) art criticism and discourse, than they would actually getting any of their work into a peer-reviewed journal, much less making a serious contribution to a scientific discipline.
Study yourself, your spouse and/or children. Seriously. Get some domotica installed, and monitor your activities as you lead your life. Formulate hypotheses and vary the circumstances. Besides the challenges involved in getting good readings, you will learn stuff about your family and yourselve that will otherwise always go unnoticed. And if you apply scientific rigor and creativity you might even get some real scientific results.
(Score:5, Not Funny)
The alternative energy movement was started at the grass roots, and continues to be led by backyard intentors. See youtube for micro hydro, solar concentrators, stirling engines, tesla turbines, and more. Fascinating area of science.
You could test the effects of certain substances on lifespan of C. Elegans, fruitflies, mice, etc. There's way too little interest from the big guys testing whether substances extend lifespan.
http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=21310
http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=what_you_can_do
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
I disagree with "The probability of you making a significant discovery at home is close to zero."
I don't think the OP is looking for fame or anything. He probably just wants to tinker in his basement in a way that will result in something new and interesting.
You can contribute to the body of scientific knowledge in a myriad of ways: there are probably bugs in your backyard that have little or no scientific study done on them...but may affect the ecosystem in important ways. The aforementioned astronomical studies are another example.
I know of one California fire fighter who studies meteors quite extensively (not meteorites, but rather makes film and radio records of meteors entering the atmosphere).
It will mostly be grunt work- stuff that professional labs are not interested in doing because its not sexy, or big money, or whatever. But it DOES contribute to the body of human scientific knowledge, so is just as valid.
I also think you can set up a pretty rocking home lab for not a huge investment. Between Ebay, government surplus auctions, university auctions, and old fashioned scrounging, you can come up with amazing stuff- electron microscopes, DNA analyzers, ECG/EEG machines, most for a few thousand dollars.
Wire your house, inside and out. Motion detectors, humidity, wind, temperature, light etc etc
rewriting history since 2109
There's always the great on-going psychological experiment called 4chan to fall back on.
Rocketry's a very interesting field. You can specialize in just about any direction: electronics, mechanical engineering, chemistry of rocket motors, aerodynamics... Have a look at the Tripoli website at http://www.tripoli.org/
Why use any special equipment? Get involved in theoretical physics and all you will need is paper, pens, perhaps a black board and internet access to the arXiv server (which is free) so there is no obstacle to you making significant contributions to, say, string theory...at least once you have got your maths up to that level! ;-)
Two fields that are ripe for hobbyists are bioinformatics and astronomy. In both cases, huge archives of expensive to generate data are poorly analyzed (that is, analyzed for one or two aims, not for all possible aims) and archived in web-accessible free databases. Other free and customizable software is available to do more analyses. Pick a topic, find one of the more or less appropriate databases, and go to town. Get published, perhaps a few times, and then you can even get some small grants to generate some custom data, the sort that might be a lynchpin in a new manuscript. Suddenly, you are a professional-level hobbyist/scientist.
My meta-suggestion would be to look for an area that has gone out of fashion. My actual suggestion (and it's not my area at all) would be relatively long wavelength radio science. Understanding the ionosphere and it's impact on short-wave radio and so on was a big deal 50 years ago, but is now fairly irrelevant. With modern digital equipment and some electronics skills you should be able to record and analyze a huge amount of data -- measure signal strengths and delays, deconvolve the signal to work out the distribution of path lengths, ultimately map the electronic properties of the lower and middle atmosphere in 4D. There must be some interesting science there. Lots of opportunities for interesting collaboration with people far away as well.
Are you a developer / IT guy? If so, you could quite likely contribute a lot to science on the tool side of things. While it would be hard to you to contribute to science directly just due to practicalities like getting subscriptions to expensive scientific journals, you could more easily contribute to, say, open source software tools, like Octave, Numpy/Scipy/other python packages, the open source fortran compilers. There's a ton of good stuff out there, but still lots of work to be done. If you dig around, you might even find a research project you could become more directly involved in. Oh, and even simpler, you could build a few high-end PCs and run Folding@Home et al. on them. It doesn't let you contribute much directly, but it's valuable for the scientists at the other end.
First of all: get used to the idea of having your discoveries/ideas ignored. If you build it they will come is a nice concept, however I think you'll find recognition is the product of showcasing more than it is a product of gravity.
Second: get it out of your head that groundbreaking is difficult. There is a whole world of problems that are being neglected for the lack of bright minds. I see (on average): one huge unfilled market need every two days.
Reprap.org is a great place to start. The rapid prototyping industry is where the hobby computer was 20 years ago. You'll learn robotics while you're at it which is the true revolution here. Servo systems, PID loops, stepper motors, PWM/H-Bridges...
http://www.willowgarage.com/ if generalized robotics is more your thing.
http://www.marssociety.org/portal/c/urc
http://www.auvsi.org/AUVSI/AUVSI/Events/AUVSIStudentCompetitions/Default.aspx
http://www.marinetech.org/rov_competition/
http://content.asce.org/conferences/nccc2010/
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread54091/pg1 (concrete submarines)
Seasteading.org is a good place to discuss Naval engineering if that turns you on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
Lockpicking101.com/blackbag.nl Locksmithing is the gateway drug to engineering. It'll develop your mind's mechanical abilities.
http://forum.saiga-12.com/ The US military is still using pump action shotguns. MG47 conversion of a saiga 12... Gun control means that gun smithing is a market which has huge gaps in market demand. BATF licensing for firearms research is so prohibitively expensive in the Destructive Devices territory: you'll be one of a small minority working on this frontier. Same with silencers and PDWs.
DIYDrones.com would be another great hobby for you. These killing machines will revolutionize warfare/disaster response.
Speaking of UAVs: learn2carbonfiber&material science. Which brings me to my next point:
I'll let you in on a secret I've learning in the process of being on the cutting edge of technology since I was 15:
-Inventions are everywhere!
Invention is applying new technology to old problems, finding solutions to new problems, or sometimes reverting to old technology when the justification for the status-quo which superseded the old technology ceases to become relevant. IE: Oil as cheap energy replacing steam.
New problems:
-rising cost of energy
-marketing narrow casting
-privacy in the face of the digital revolution
Old problems:
-overpopulation
-carrying capacity of the planet eg. clean water/food production
-manufacturing productivity
-living space ergonomics-established habits create bubbles of unfilled market needs
-personal productivity
-cheap building construction
-efficient distribution of resources(lending industry)
-transportation efficiency(transport of goods/people quickly and at minimum expense)
Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
Drool over this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
http://www.kopin.com/
Learn about these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-anarchism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_money
http://www.i2p2.de/
http://www.bitcoin.org/
http://www.hashcash.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system combined with this: http://www.skyrove.com/ = bandwidth is the new gold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensairity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
http://opensourcemachine.org/
http://www.openfarmtech.org/index.php/Main_Page
202.114.89.60/resource/pdf/2509.pdf
Welcome to my world.
It seems odd to me how "don't try this at home" has beaten out DIY. While one could easily blame politics (a society of otherwise ignorant specialists is more controllable than polymaths), I'm tempted to attribute the shift to exponential growth of technology. Most hobbies, like chemistry or astronomy, have existed for long enough that the whole process has been simplified to the point that only a minimal set of tools is required.
Newer technologies, like semiconductors, have had little reason to simplify their techniques. Sure, you can make transistors at home, but it's very difficult to adapt techniques designed for use in labs to ones safe/cheap enough to do at home. It's kind of a Catch-22 with accessibility, not too many people are working on it since it's not accessible, and it's not accessible since not too many people are working on it.
There's also the issue of error. Home-labs have much higher rates of error both due to the economics of scale, and the use of non-ideal, but simple & cheap techniques. If the experts doing highly controlled experiments have to do something a hundred times before finding something that works, then a hobbyist might not ever see a success. So, I'd imagine that you'd need to approach the matter from the ground up, rather than try to replicate something done in a lab.
An example might be genetics. Starting your own home lab would be fairly expensive. You'd need some type of centrifuge, a device to do gel electrophoresis, something to visualize DNA on a gel with, a PCR machine, a micropipette, and several enzymes. The trick is that you can make most of that stuff on your own. A centrifuge can be made out of a drill, a gel electrophoresis tank is simple enough to make, UV lights are coming down in price, and a DIY PCR machine can be made with a Peltier plate and a microcontroller. It'd take a few months to build all that, but that's half the fun. Micropipettes are relatively cheap, and enzymes can be home grown if you're willing to spend the time/space growing cultures. None of that would be very precise (or pure), so your sucess rate would be abysmal, but it's cheap and I'd imagine a pretty fun hobby both in building all that and after you got everything setup. The beauty of genetics is that you can get DNA sequences online, and design your own experiments taking into account your equipment's limitations. I just wouldn't try anything too big (e.g. sequencing a genome), or something that requires a lot of precision. And accept that the failure rate will be frustratingly high.
If you want to make a discovery, then I'd imagine you'd need to find some poorly researched area and spend a decade or two on it. By that time you'll be an expert in that area. Take advantage of the fact you're in it for the long haul (and aren't scrambling to publish in order to justify your funding), and do a long-term experiment. Or do something in a field that doesn't have much grant money available (e.g. a local plant or animal, rather than something like cancer).
You know, it seems that you could pick any area of study almost at random, and if you keep a good attitude about it all, keep it up, take good notes and above all retain a "beginner's mind" you'll stumble upon something at least semi-interesting sooner or later.
So forget about the nay-sayers, buy yourself a microscope or bunsen burner or tesla coil telescope or tig welder or co2 laser or whatever and have at it. Have fun! And good luck!
New discoveries are hard to make. They require a ton of specialized knowledge these days. A lot of scientific fields go pretty deep these days, and you'll have to follow them all the way down to compete.
Engineering on the other hand--coming up with a new way to use new tools--well, that's a very broad field, and the technologies are always so new that a novice can get in SOMEwhere. Some people say software engineering; if it was me, I'd look into the Makerbot project. If you can find ways to improve the production of Makerbots, or reduce the cost of their expensive components, you can help make them more ubiquitous in homes nationwide...and THAT will probably change the world a lot more than a fair number of scientific endeavors. Alternately, things like that protein folding game (Foldit?) that was mentioned on Slashdot a day or two ago could be a place to start.
Associate yourself with a team that can find a job for amateurs. Even if it's a very loose association, you'll need a support network in your field of choice...and, well, you need people to tell you when you're barking up the wrong tree. For example, if even half the backyard geniuses who try to expand on Tesla's creations had someone telling them which parts of their work had already been duplicated long, long ago, chasing them out of that line of questioning and onto another, we'd probably have mars colonies by now...
Find an important OS in hacker history, such as ITS. Get an emulator working for it, and put together a turnkey system that runs on Linux where you can boot the OS without having to be an expert at using the emulator. Have sane defaults, like enough disk space to create files, etc. Put together basic how-to instructions to load the emulator, connect to a terminal, log on, etc. Make sure major software (Macsyma, Emacs, etc) is available. Then get more hardcore doc and put it together into a package for people who want to go farther.
I love old operating systems, but they are a huge time sink. Computer history is like nothing else in human experience, because you don't simply study it - you can actually run it and experience it EXACTLY like people did back in the day.
In Canada any expense you incur you can claim back as tax credits; it's called sr&ed ; www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/menu-eng.html
Unfortunately for the real hard scientific research as in labs and universities, it would be far to costly and would take a minimum of a PhD. And if you did have the money and the education well, you wouldn't be asking us.
That's exactly what they told the guy who went on to invent....the wheel, the candle, the lightbulb, the home computer, etc. The "lone" scientist has never really been alone. He stands on the shoulders of giants and simply looks at what exists through a different set of eyes. Breakthroughs are an entirely different animal than refinements. It is generally expensive, lots of hard work, and the worker is ridiculed and chided by those around him as a "waste of time". They are told that only "real scientists" and labs can succeed ....until they produce a prototype/proof of concept that captures the imagination of the imaginationless.
Some people work their whole lives and never succeed. Others hit the jackpot in their teens. The point is, their initial efforts are almost never about being "the guy" as much as they are about "I know this could work, even if no one else believes." Sometimes they are right. Often they are wrong.
Franklin, Tesla, Edison, the Wright brothers..... didn't get into invention because it was a quick way to make a profit or simply the narcissitic satisaction of being able to say "I am the one." True invention is a labor of love and defiance. "I believe in my ideas, so strongly, that I will not allow lack of resources, ridicule, or time stand in my way. I will work tirelessly, until I have succeeded and proven to the world." Fame, money, and ego are certain to become involved, but they are not the source.
You could buy a decent computer and run Molecular dynamics simulation of proteins.
There is a lot of space in this field and it is very simple to set up open source or free packages like GROMACS or Autodock, to analize the protein behaviour and possible new drugs.
There are companies that sell time on telescopes - Slooh and LightBuckets come to mind. Typically their scopes are well-sited and at least as big/capable as anything you're likely to have as an amateur. The CEO of LightBuckets (who isn't by any means a professional astronomer - he used to work for Norton/Symantec) was a classmate of mine in an astronomy class last year, and just for kicks, he used one of his company's telescopes to do a survey (14 hours of imaging over the course of a week) using a 24-inch R-C, to see whether it would turn up any new asteroids. Found 17 of them.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Most microbes and bugs have never been studied. Never named, not characterized in any of the thousand ways that, say, the sparrow is. Some of these unknown microbes live in your house or yard, perhaps even some arthropods or insects. Get a microscope, start looking, and follow the trail where it leads and where your talents take you.
Just pick something you want to work on and do it. Doesn't matter what it is.
Build your own equipment (you might discover something along the way); or, troll through trash and scrap from "tech" companies, go to auction houses, online auctions, flea markets, and so on. I built my own furnace by starting with a $20 refurbished toaster oven and modifying it. I got a vacuum pump by acquiring a turbo pump station from trash (with permission of the company) and then salvaging and repairing the roughing pump. I refurbished an oxygen generator that a medical supply/rental place threw away -- so now I have an endless supply of dry low pressure 95% purity oxygen.
When you need parts, the internet is your friend. I always start with Mcmaster or Digikey. If you're willing to be creative, you'd be surprised what you can find on Amazon and Ebay. Cheap (disposable) tools can be obtained from Harbor Freight. Several sources sell chemicals in small quantities -- but a lot of chemicals can be source from hardware stores and similar sources(if you know what to look for).
Just do it.
Cold. Fusion.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I've looked into this: find someone who wants to sell an older-generation satellite dish. Sounds interesting.
Super fun, easy to use and program in a variety of free 3rd party languages. All the specs and schematics and ICDs are available on the lego websites (so you can make your own sensors and actuators, or conversely, interface NXT parts to your own controller/PC).
http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx?domainredir=mindstorms.com
Here's a 3rd party site where my son and I picked up free projects to build (we just got done w/the line follower robot).
http://nxtprograms.com/
Because Lego documented everything, there are lots of 3rd party books and actuators/sensors.
The "Brick" (microcontroller) has built in motor drivers and A/D, and i2c for digital sensors/actuators. The motors are DC w/quadrature encoder feedback (so you can sense their position/compute their velocity), and are driven via PWM. Again, everything's documented (look for the hardware SDK on the Lego site) so you can build/interface on your own.
This is a great book that helps you expand beyond what the kit can do.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590598180?tag=mindstorsensorin&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1590598180&adid=01KME20BFYGSWPZ48XNA&
Hit up Youtube and search for NXT and you'll see all kinds of creative things ppl do with the kit, including lots of "segway" devices (inverted pendulums).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ulBRQKCwd4
While my son enjoys using the NX-G language (a Labview-based environment that comes w/the kit) I prefer a real RTOS and C++, so I'm working on software to interface it to an old PC running QNX (www.qnx.com - free for non-commercial use, full source provided). I happen to have some old A/D, D/A, encoder, etc. PC boards around.
You could do it with Linux as well with the RT patches but QNX is way cool (microkernel, device drivers are user-space programs so you can write them in whatever language - I use C++ - and you debug them from Eclipse just like any program, start/stop them like any program, etc.) It's also self hosted (so you can use VI and gcc/g++ right on the target OS), or you can use the linux or windows eclipse-based cross-development environments.
Ok, here is a suggestion in the astronomy venue.
Standard astronomy/astrophysics is not going to be looking for signs of an "engineered" universe (because astronmers/physicists really want the Universe to be "dead" (otherwise things get extremely complicated). At the same time classical SETI research largely wants "them" to be talking to us. Pick the middle ground -- the universe may have potentially many (intelligent, advanced, technological civilizations) and they have no interest in talking to us. As one would presume that said ATC take their stars "dark" (this is the Kardashev pre KT-type I to KT-type II civilization transition) This has been expressed in theories involving Dyson shells and subsequently Matrioshka Brains.
Now the point to understand is that the rate of conversion of a solar system from a KT-I to a KT-II level depends a lot on the nature of the solar system and the technology the ATC has at its disposal. Within our solar system if we have full nanotechnology capabilities it would probably take place in months. So the key point is that a civilization transitioning from KT-I to KT-II level generally makes its star disappear. Astronomers don't like to watch things like this, presumably they view them as anomalies -- stars don't "go dark" they turn into supernovas or white dwarfs because that is stellar theory unencumbered by the details of intelligence, technology, etc.
There is not currently to the best of my knowledge a survey of the entire sky looking for the rate at which "stars go dark". But it is the kind of exercise one can conduct at home using simple 35mm cameras and then expand to larger cameras, telescopes, recruit people from around the world, etc.
One would simply take pictures every night, download the data, do the image analysis (roughly an inverse of looking for supernovas), plot trends, etc. This work cannot produce a negative result as even the lack of stars going dark begins to constrain the f_i and f_c parameters of the Drake Equation which provides very useful information for SETI in general and exobiologists more generally.
It is also a project which scales quite readily as one recruits people looking at different parts of the sky, employs better cameras, telescopes, etc. It is also a bit different from "classical" astronomy in that it is more about how the universe "is" rather than how the universe "was". Presumably if there is a "rate at which stars go dark" it should diminish with the age of stars/galaxies studied. That in turn tends to specify rate at which civilizations can evolve to an intelligent technological state. Also another useful piece of information.
If you would like to go further in this direction feel free to contact me.
There's another concern about special equipment as well -- for instance, in the US, some types of glassware needed to explore chemistry, and perhaps to some extent biology, have been classified as "drug paraphernalia" by our insane government. You can get in some rather severe legal binds because you honestly want to "do" science if you just go about it like an innocent person would.
One oft-quoted example is that it is illegal in Texas to own anything with a ground glass joint; the rumor is that you can get a permit to get around this, so that's something to try... of course, if they don't issue the permit, you've lost your anonymity and that's the end of anything that requires that type of glassware.
You can be sure there are rules and regulations about chemicals themselves, too. Heck, around here (Montana), if you buy a bottle of NyQuil at one pharmacy, then go to another and buy one, you're going to be arrested almost immediately. They presume, you see, that you are going to manufacture Meth. Apparently our legislators have never experienced cold symptoms. Or maybe they're just fucking retarded (based on other evidence, I generally go with the latter.) In any case, don't assume that you can buy some innocuous thing and no one will pay any attention. There's a whole world of surveillance and paranoia waiting to see what you might do. To you, it's pursuit of science, and noble. To the prosecutor, it's just a feather in their cap. Don't let those two worlds collide, ever.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you mix Gatorade, toluene and brake fluid, it makes one hell of a party liquor. Bits of fresh pineapple make it more festive.
It's amazing the variety of altered states you can attain from mixing household substances from under the kitchen sink and in the metal cabinet in the garage.
Well, you asked.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ignore established shit and follow your own way.
An example of how this can be done:
http://pyvm.hobby-site.org/pyvm
I wonder if Faizdog lives in the R&D field or is just an observer... I agree that no one is going to make advances in high energy particle physics in their garage without $$$$$ in equipment. But many fields are easily accessible with a bit of knowledge and education.
And at smaller universities where independent thought is allowed there are many example projects that are attainable without thousands of dollars in equipment. People make due with what they have and small universities don't have the big bucks to waste millions in equipment for a very few professors and a few students to watch sit idle and to be surplussed in 10 years.
IMO, the most important factor in "lone research" is education and drive. Education lets you act in a direction that will get you there quickest. Drive gives the motivation to spend long hours researching what has been done before and building the opportunity with sweat and love. I agree with the other posters. DO WHAT YOU LOVE!
What about Alternative Energy research? Yep, we can get electricity from huge wind turbines but what can the home owner build themselves to reduce the electrical bill? Is is possible to build a solar cell without a huge lab? What about batteries?
Another point is that many inventions were built in the past with equipment that was advanced then but is obsolete or forgotten now. With today's industry (and EBAY) some of that equipment can be built from common materials or purchased cheaply.
Try getting into programming and Computer Science. I'm currently a CS PhD student and fortunately, my chosen field requires only a computer, a good compiler, and a white board. So you can easily do academic quality research from home in this type of field.
Or try ham radio. This is a common "nerd" hobby that has quite a few research opportunities. When you start getting into the science of your antenna, or building your own radio from scratch, you can get into some pretty deep areas. Once I finish school, I plan on getting a nice ham setup.
Another one you could try is model rocketry. This is another area that has very deep research topics. Although, this will probably only be suitable if you live out in the country. I used to do this all the time as a kid. But once you start getting into the high altitude stuff, with onboard electronics, it can get really fun.
After about a year Hubble data is available online. So is data from a bunch of world class instruments. Learning to reduce and data mine that data will allow you to potentially contribute. You have to be good enough to pick up on something that the experts have missed or haven't had time to analyse. Even the basic reduction isn't an easy thing to learn, especially on your own and unsupported by an institution.
If you want to collect original data you can always get into variable star observing. Chances are you will not make a discovery (though again you can go data mining) but if you collect data points they may be used to make a discovery. I don't know how long this will be relevant until nightly whole sky surveys take over but for now it's a good way to get involved. Start here http://www.aavso.org/
I agree with others who've stated that if your motivation is to get famous you're probably barking up the wrong tree. You may get lucky but your chances of winning lotto are better. That doesn't mean you can't contribute.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You just need to look at the areas where we're not very far along. I can think of a bunch right off the top of my head:
In short, the opportunities are sitting there, waiting for the right person with the right mindset to come along and find the key idea(s) the others have been missing. Those ideas may be huge and complex, or they may be very simple indeed. There's no way to know until they're here. But what we do know is that there are plenty of places where opportunity exists. What you make of that opportunity is always up in the air.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Discovering something new or making a scientific breakthrough is a difficult thing to do. The smartest people in the world have already examined every possible aspect of reality. I'm a scientist, and this is why it is so damn hard to make a career out of it.
The smartest scientist I ever met said:
There are three ways to make a breakthrough:
1. you can examine a new stream of data (e.g., new sensors, new algorithms, or use massive processing power that was previously impractical)
2. you can bring ideas from one field into another (e.g., evolutionary models have spread from biology to every other field)
3. you can be smarter than everyone else
Don't plan on using the third method.
Use your acquired talents and abilities to guide you intot he subject. I am pensionned off and next year I intend to do just what you mentionned: do lab work. My strongest abilities are draftting, programming ,and machine shop practice (lathe and milling) so I'll be replicating some machine I saw on the net and try to see if they do work and then make them way better.
Ever heard of the Clem engine...or that magick magnet motor from Japan. How about that Stanley Meyer hydrogen car...you get the idea.
Come up with a cheaper, simpler, more efficient woodgas design
Stoves Camp 2010 is July 26-30
is coming up.
To start playing all you need is aluminum foil
Look at some of Paul Stamets' work with mycoremediation. He's got several books and an inspirational TED talk online. In addition, check out the company Ecovative Design and see how they grow some awesome cradle-to-cradle packaging and insulating material in a matter of days using mycelium. You might have some fun growing this stuff at home, looking at it under a microscope, potentially identifying new species, and learning how to use fungi to engineer a healthy environment in your back yard!
The amateur rocketry hobby is alive and well. It does have some minor barriers to entry (i.e. obtaining a Low or - preferrable high - explosives manufacturing permit), but many hobbyists have surmounted that hurdle. And, hey, it's a lot of fun!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In 1974 I had the following book, plus I was unemployed, there was an energy crisis underway, and I had an HP-21 programmable calculator and a BA in American Studies.
An Introduction to Scientific Research - Edgar Bright Wilson - 1990
The result was I started a social systems research project that I am still doing.
My project is neither a success nor a failure. If anything, social system research results in perceiving the culture. Culture is an object that we usually live within. The framework of culture is usually invisible to those living within it.
My microscopic level of notoriety is my blog comes up first when doing a search for "Put carts on the public bus"
So, I recommend you get the Wilson book through inter-library loan. I also recommend you develop your library access and research system.
If you do research, hang on to your records. I did measurements back in the 80's that are unexpectedly out of synch with recent measurements. Fortunately I saved the record logs and eventually I will go back and try and understand the differences.
Any suggestions on where to get started with the microscope stuff? Maybe some amazon links to some products or software, or a hobby website?
Only a couple of thousand bacteria species, out of the hundreds of thousands of that likely exist have been named. This is a field ripe for discovery but it generally takes some sequencing to establish your favorite is new to science. Sequencing can be bought at less than $25 a run.
Similarly, find a family of beetles that interests you and become a taxonomic expert in that. Of the beatle species in the world, less than 50% have been named and described.
The most practical solution however is to participate in science by being a guinea pig. Sign up for psych, or nutrition studies without doing harm to yourself (ie drug trials) and sometimes you can earn money doing it.
Other ideas..
fossil hunting
meteor hunting
mineral prospecting
inventing unpowered refrigeration devices to keep vaccine cool in tropical places without electricity
I got a book about bioinformatics the other day, out of curiosity more than anything else. So far its been quite interesting. Theres loads of online databases and tools you can access, apparently making it quite easy to do research from home. I guess you would need to have some idea of what you want to achieve though, which is something I don't have yet o_O
The soundcard/chip on your PC is a good 2channel AD converter for signals in the audio range. Need more channels? Buy another soundcard or another PC. Linux hint: install xoscope. I'm glad I did. It's in all the repositories.
So, while the concept of the lone scientist is romantic, exciting and inspiring, in the modern era it's unrealistic in my opinion
I don't know, just looking at the comments in this story, it seems like there is a lot of potential still. A lot of people have some good ideas.
Qxe4
I would recommend looking into supernova searching. As an undergraduate, I worked in a lab that used a robotic telescope high in the mountains to automatically search for these extremely bright and relatively common phenomena. Given their brightness and longevity, it is relatively simple (in astronomical terms) to design and build a system to look for these objects. check out KAIT, the telescope I worked on.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
It's nuclear weapon development!
Kisses...
Kim Jong Il
That is all.
I find the field really exciting right now. I've built a hexapod driven by open source code and I hope to develop it into either a rapid prototyper or a 6-axis CNC (depending on how stable I can get it)
More info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpIoI0G7CE , here: http://visual-hexapod.sourceforge.net/ , and here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SPIDEE-1/113425788691280?v=wall
I'd love some help improving the design & firmware. With the low entry cost for arduino and sensors, the biggest expense is servos. There's no reason you can't build your own 3-axis miller for
Check out RepRap. It is a 3D printer that can copy itself (or a significant part of itself, really). There is a lot of room for research which can be performed with a small budget. In fact, that is the whole point of the project.
You can even try to win the $80,000 Gada Prize. Basically, join a group and try to make enough improvements to make it accessible to residents of developing countries.
I haven't started participating yet, but I plan to.
Much of the posted material is very accurate. Find that which you love to do and then do that. Chances are, you won't make any grand discoveries at a scale to change a field (this is one of the toughest things many graduate students need to learn), but you'll learn amazing things along your way. Plus, science and research is typically a matter of many "failures" and, as such, will require an almost in-human tenacity to make any progress. If you don't love it, then it will only be an exercise in futility.
What I did not see posted, and I apologize if I missed it, is that there are plenty of things to be had without an expensive lab or budget. The science and research community has inflated itself to a point where most all organizations are trying to do big and amazing things, while passing over the simple basic questions. And they need to be answered. To build a transistor radio, you need to know how to build the basic components. Too many places are forgetting that basic science is still very important and much of it hasn't been investigated.
If you are serious about this, utilize access to free peer reviewed material and start reading heavily into the subject matter of interest. For each article, critically ponder what is going on and try to see a weakness in the methodology or a "better" (read: different) way to do the same thing but would yield different results. Write those thoughts down right after you read the article and catalog the article using some form of indexing method. After you have read very many articles, you will start to sense where the subject matter of interest has a research need. This can be a starting point. My other suggestion is that you can investigate the relationships between disciplines. This will require a lot more research, but there are many un-answered questions in this realm. Society has fractionated scientific disciplines so much so that we have little understanding between the interconnections and we are only just starting to learn that those interconnections are very important.
Good Luck!
Honestly, I think it's a great time in history for home-researchers. As we approach singularity there are almost an infinite amount of new technologies to combine in unique ways. Right now i'm combining 3d-projectors powered by nvidia 3d-vision, real-time 3d engines, 4th dimension to 3rd dimension mathematical transformations, and custom methods to project onto non-standard geometric surfaces.. As if peeking to the 4th dimension wasn't enough-- don't even ask what i'm doing with my roombas and the HSS hypersonic sound cannon.. ;)
You're an intellectual wet blanket.
How many scientists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? They all stumble around in the dark, until somebody finds the socket.
Only insignificant inventions are easy - and those people in the past who picked all the "low hanging fruit" would argue we have it much easier today. We've got more -everything- than they ever had, plus the result of their work.
Here's a list of simple advice:
Most discoveries are problems. And vice versa.
Make up some reasons for "why", before, during, and after - or you'll run out.
Never ever seek approval from anyone. They can't give what you do more meaning, they can only take it away.
Normal people are tragically sane; they'll never see what doesn't exist, until it exists.
Never ask for help without first spending days trying to figure it out, or you'll always remain helpless.
Don't give any shred of your own responsibility away until it's "done", the details will get lost in translation. (Do you know what I mean? Yes? Great, do it then. What do you mean you can't find a suitable chicken? There's no chicken involved !@#$%^& idiot.)
If you want to go the mad scientist route, build a satellite in your basement. It's about the same cost as buying a motorcycle ($8K including launch) and, as far as mid-life crises go, a lot cooler. I'm doing it ( http://projectcalliope.com/ ), and blogging about how it goes at http://scientificblogging.com/satellite_diaries
You get to learn neat stuff about electronics, Arduino-level programming, and HAM radio.
It's worth it just for when people ask what I do for fun...
A.
Modern biomedical research is pushed at a very rapid pace due to grant/publication deadlines and goals. This is all great, but it leaves a huge gap - there is little place in modern labs for projects that require patience and long terms to complete. Here is one example where hobbyist can make a dent and with luck some money. Breed mice. Feed them high fat diet (aka McDonalds) and select for animals with life span that is either longer or shorter than the average. The goal is to create too lines of animals - one that tolerates high caloric intake and one that does not. If you are lucky and get these lines, I know of couple of companies and thousands of researches that would love to be friends with you. The reason is that the follow up research, once you have the animals is trivial, rapid and very rewarding. Besides, your mice will be a nice model for testing obesity drugs. The key here is patience and consistency. My guesstimate is that it will take you somewhere between 8 and 15 years to complete the breeding. This is enormous commitment. You can't place the work on hold hen going on vacation (you can but technically it is outside the hobbyist realm) and you have to take care of the animals pretty much on a daily basis (mice stink).
I take from your post the hobby/commercial adventure is a profit thing. Mixing hobbies with the perception of gaining profits is a disaster in the makings. The post also indicates high intelligence with the funds to finance these endeavors however, it is apparent you have reached a point in your life with more money than direction. Therefore my only recommendation is to seek out someone with similar interest that understands the nature of things at face value.
The attitude expressed by Faizdog applies to fields where advances in technology open up new scientific questions. This set of scientific questions is, in my experience, a small subset of all interesting questions, but a large set of the questions that are useful or marketable.
I remember a graduate student in my lab who did experiments in his kitchen on the molecular determinants of butterfly wing color and patterning. This is not exactly a hot field (in contrast to his lab research), but with simple and cleanly articulated goals he managed to open up a new field of research. Technology is occasionally the enemy of good science. By focusing on only the questions enabled by new tech, we ignore many others that are equally interesting. Combine this bias with the fact that most fields are underpopulated, much research is not replicated, and it is always easier to incrementally extend previous research than to do something really creative, there is an enormous amount that can be done cheaply and at home.
But true scientific R&D, where you discover something new, forget about it for the most part.
Bollocks: that might be true for some scientific disciplines, but it is not true for all.
The difficulties with "scientific discoveries" is:
Have a look at biology: the smaller you go the less we know - crap-loads of stuff waiting to be discovered. And if you have hard science or software skills, all the better!
Sociology/Anthropology: heaps of opportunities here. Ooooodles of free data available if you want to process information from internet. OR watch a group of people and follow your nose on something interesting.
Happy moony
Fusion power. This feild of science is just waiting for a breakthrough by a garage amature scientist. Then you can sell a free energy fusion power adapter for automobile carberators.
I did some EEG work while working on a prosthetic for deaf infants -- how to even tell if it was having any effect? No one had looked into that, it was wide open and easy to make real progress at.
I got a nice telescope and camera setup, and did do some stuff I thought was worthwhile in digital signal processing to get rid of some atmospherics. And it was fun.
Now I work on nuclear fusion full time. Since it's my time, my money, my lab, I can do things no governement or university can, the most important one of which is turn on a dime every time I learn something new. My results are at worst "competitive" with all comers in the particular area I'm working in too -- all that money hasn't bought them much progress as it hasn't been spent wisely.
If in today's science, a lab grunt brought a potential Fleming a contaminated petri dish, they'd get harsh words, a do over if not a reprimand, and we'd not find penicillin.
In today's science, if an apple hits you on the head, you build a roof or move away from the tree, you don't try and figure out why.
Yes, the chances of one person doing something really earth shaking are about like they've always been, but that means -- there's a chance. Einstein was mentioned, but there are many others going back and forward in time from that, quite a few actually, and most of them didn't have the gear I have or can get cheap surplus. What was "rocket science" in the 30's is now around on ebay for pennies.
Think of the greats who would have *killed* to get the scientific gear we can get today for cheap, and how much low hanging fruit there might be as science rushed on to the next sexy thing, leaving behind quite a lot for the button sorter types -- who wouldn't realize something new happening if it killed them.
And here on Slashdot, we can afford to remember that rocket science started in the middle kingdom some thousands of years ago, and I'd bet some of it was done by what we call drunken rednecks today.
It's a matter of perspective.
My site shows some of what I can do -- go ahead and bang on me, my ISP boasts they can take a Slashdotting, lets see if they can. You should be nice to
these guys, as that's a home-class server on a not very fat pipe funded by the guy who shares it with us, but it's a group of pretty smart guys who *are right now* doing things in advance of the big boys. If you are clever, you might not need billions and big buildings to find things out that are useful. So, the word is, go for it.
I had to spend most of a lifetime getting ready -- you know, money, knowledge, experience, equipment, all that mundane crap. But it was worth it for me, and should be to you too.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
You don't always need to discover or invent something to improve society. Fast, cheap city wide Internet access would greatly improve society. The technology exists, it's a matter of overcoming the lobbyists.
Install a high bandwidth router in each car. Our cars would create the mobile adhoc network citywide.
A city would only need two-five high bandwidth routers to service the entire city.
As more cars embed the router, the city wide network coverage improves.
You should look into the area of Ham Radio.
If you use HF or ELF Equipment, you could start checking out the ionosphere.
Or you could go the opposite route and try building and researching stuff at EHF - Hams are permited to use ALL frequencies above 300 Ghz even at the lowest license class. You also get access to space on 70 Cm, 2 Meters, 6 Meters, 220 Mhz, ect. For a complete list and more info check out www.arrl.org
Also, you could mess around with new antenna designs, or radio circuits - as long as it isn't too noisy, doesn't radiate spurious signals, and doesn't exceed exposure limits, you can do it!
You also get to use up to 2,000 watts of power.
There is only one science in which a hobbyist can do cutting edge research at home, with more or less no financial investment: mathematics. Google "Riemann Hypothesis" and then try to prove it.
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
A lot of scientists (including me!) study the sounds that animals make. It's pretty cheap -- you just need a digital recorder and a good microphone. There are three ways that a /.-type could make real contributions
* record local critters. It is challenging (and therefore potentially fun) to make good-quality recordings. There are many species, especially things that aren't birds, that have not been recorded. (http://macaulaylibrary.org/inside/build/mostWanted/index.do) If a species has been recorded before, then your recordings can help with studies about geographic or year-to-year variation.
* write software for analyzing animal sounds. Most bioacousticians who go beyond a simple spectrogram try to analyze other species' sounds by using approaches from human speech recognition research. There's a lot of CS ground to be covered.
* make gadgets for remotely / autonomously recording sound. I don't know much about this but it's got to be similar to robotics in challenge and cost.
Some fields in physics such as granular/fluid dynamics are poorly understood and there is not a lot of experimental data. Experiments can be relatively simple if the researcher is imaginative (ingredients: water, fluorescent dye, blue leds, video camera). These fields would certainly benefit from home research if done properly. You would spent some money but definitely not thousands to have a simple setup. There is also psychoacoustics. For example, I'm developing a way to calculate Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTF's) using minimal equipment (an audio card, computer and tiny microphones). It is exciting and the learning experience is great even if the whole thing turns out to be too complex/costly to pursue. I think this latter point is what makes home research worthwhile. Also bear in mind that there's a lot of money spent on research in big institutions that doesn't lead to anything fruitful. It may also happen in your home lab but then you wouldn't be worried of not finding a good postdoc position, losing tenure or not getting a grant!
I vote for microfluidics (lab-on-a-chip). There are new approaches (supplementary info) that will cost you very little money to get started, and an enormous problem space that is sorely in need of some open-source hacking to move the field forwards (disclaimer - I am an author on that paper). As an added bonus, you can choose problem areas within the field that interest you (energy? water purification? bacterial analysis? glucose monitoring? it's all there)
You're mistakenly equating invention (engineering) with discovery (science). There are many examples of home invention, not to mention the many tech businesses that sprang from garages or small numbers of founders (e.g. HP, Apple, Oracle, Google, Sun, SGI, iRobot, Dean Kamen's firm, Kurzweil Synthesizers, etc).
Many very successful inventions sprang from the minds of individuals (intermittent wipers, Breathe Right Nasal Strips, Gatorade, Ronco kitchen products), few of which were technologically sophisticated.
The road to success takes no more than a single good idea followed by a *lot* of development. (e.g. Edison's many trials to find the right filament material for his light bulb.). What you lack in genius or education can certainly be surmounted with a bit of cleverness and a lot more persistence.
Good luck.
Don't bother with any DIY chemistry research at home. As far as the authorities are concerned, anyone doing this is either a terrorist or operating a drug lab.
I'm into Hierarchical Temporal Memory, a new approach to AI. This has been mentioned on Slashdot a few times, search for Jeff Hawkins. I just did a presentation the other day at a local research enthusiasts' club as to why I think this is one of the rare opportunities to do significant amateur research.
Basically
- A departure from most traditional approaches, so no need to read all that existing literature.
- No expensive equipment needed, just a PC and maybe computational time on Amazon EC2.
- If you like hardware/gadgets, plug a robot into it, AI and robots are closely related.
- Broad field of applicability. Other than the standard AI things like vision, speech recognition etc. you could plug this into abovementioned EEG and discover signal patterns or such.
I have some specific ideas about where to take this, email me at htmresearch@fastmail.fm
Once you've got a working theory, it's not really the cost of the equipment, it's the cost of the permits. Local governments right uppity when you mention 'nuclear' in any kind of regulatory discussion.
My solution to that is to lie and tell them I simply collect and recondition old computer equipment (what I really do ;)
But if I ever do get the time machine working, I'll let you know about it last Sunday!
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Case in point was a friend of mine in college- real geology buff, the sort of guy who was always digging around for rocks. Wandering through the college's woods one day he came across something very odd one day, marked the location and dug it up. It turned out to be a chunk of fossil walrus bone, from a species that wasn't thought to have lived anywhere nearby.
Was this "significant"? In the grand scheme of things, probably not- it merely indicated that this species of walrus was more widespread than thought. But the slow accumulation of this sort of knowledge is the real backbone of science.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
All that said, don't be discouraged and best of luck with your chosen field of research. If you do decide to turn to EEG feel free to contact me directly for more information or perhaps even to collaborate.
Cheers!
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
When a new genome is sequenced, something like 50% of its genes have no known function. These mystery genes are not similar enough to genes in other organisms with a known function to guess what they do. There are many tens of thousands of identified genes sitting in databases where no one has a first clue as to what they do.
Depending on what environments you have access to, there are tens to tens of thousands of unidentified organisms sitting right under your nose. Especially microorganisms. Traditionally, only microorganisms that can be cultured are "identified". Before Ventner blew his wad on what is basically a parlor trick (his synthetic genome project), he sailed around sequencing ocean water, thereby discovering organisms based on their genomes rather than based on his ability to culture them. That resulted in a lot of previously unidentified organisms.
Other people (Norm Pace) isolate entire operons from soil rather than from identified organisms. An operon is a bacterium's "work-flow" encoded in DNA to manufacture some chemical molecule. Here he's identifying organisms by function instead of by genome or by culturability.
This is sort of like using Google for writing code. Likelier than not, the solution to efficient energy production, manufacturing of exotic chemicals, all kinds of interesting things already exists. Its just a question of finding them.
It takes some investment in getting surplus lab stuff (lots of labs are shutting down thanks to a flat NIH budget), but its less than you think. You do need to find the right incentive. Science is a path mostly filled with frustration and failure. If you don't find the journey itself sufficiently rewarding, you will very quickly lose interest.
Here's the problem with the scientific R&D. In order to do something worthwhile, you need to be up to speed on what's already invented. Unfortunately, getting up to speed is HARD. You read a paper, and that paper references 10 other papers which you'd ideally need to read to understand things well. This is why most research positions require a PhD. Not because PhDs are smarter per se (though they often are), but because they won't hole themselves up in a lab for a year to reinvent the bicycle.
Just playing around with lights and plants got me one sweet job designing LED panels for growing stuff. Hopefully I get it ultra-efficient and get to put it in space one day!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If you've never done hydroponics, it's a fascinating hobby (and not just for pot). High pressure sodium lights are great and all but 85W CFLs work just fine too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murashige_and_Skoog_medium
That might lead you to tissue culture. I enjoyed this book:
Plants From Test Tubes: An Introduction to Micropropagation http://www.timberpress.com/books/plants_test_tubes/kyte/9780881923612
Experiment with signalling chemicals. See, e.g. http://www.phytotechlab.com/
Also, don't forget the fungi. It is rumored that even Paul Stamets started out with Psilocybes, but fungi offer many other gifts to humans. Get some confidence with the PFTek, read the book "The Mushroom Cultivator" and move on to grain transfer methods and casing. Explore other uses for the fungi, e.g. biomass, or thermal depolymerization (fungi to oil).. isolate useful industrial chemicals or unique organic molecules. See this TED talk: http://blog.ted.com/2008/05/paul_stamets.php
If computers and electronics are your thing, instrumentation of your experiments can be very rewarding. With the information from instrumentation, you can build models and have active feedback (e.g. adjust pH, light cycles, automatically adjusting nutrient balance, adding water, you name it). See Norbert Wiener, et al..
Pretty hard if you want to darn near prove a negative, prove no human being has ever photographed that particular species of algae before.
Or, pick an area that is so obscure that it's all but certain that no one else is working on it. As a bonus, any paper you write will be seminal! :-)
setiQuest
These days real men fuck with DNA, stem cells, in a basement lab, deploying their own robotics, to create life out of nothing.
Once your creature is done, as a side effect you solve the cure of cancer, AIDS and the other top 25 deseases, but your focus is really on sending to universe your own creature on the time machine, you just completed, targetting an Earth-like planet in a paralell universe, which you named after your favourite actress.
By then you are such a hot chick-magnet, that you are on your way to your next hobby, that you might find the most satisfying among all.
My pick would be amateur high powered rocketry. With the recent change in our and FCC's regs regarding thrust and weight limits, I could put together a project from scratch to build a bird designed for carrying instrumentation up and back down thru noctoluscent clouds and bringing the bird back for reuse. It'd take you 2 to 3 years and $10K to build your self and equipment up to this point. It'd take another $20K to pull off this project including transpoerting your self and stuff to where the night clouds are (polar regions). With $50K I could make a good try at putting someone over the 100km altitude space limit.
But as for your EEG stuff, damn straight you could do meaningful work. I had several undergrad lab classes do worthy projects, get them published, present them at conferences, all using outdated physio equipment. The field is wide open. Doing primary EEG research is a dead end, but using one to verify and validate sensory/perceptual or cognitive results makes the latter big news. Write threesigma at rocketmail dot com if you want a veteran brain science hacker's help.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
( remember OpenEEG, AND its limitation: it filters-out Gamma-waves! :)
My plan is to record both through the OpenEEG second-stage AND
to record through a multi-channel sound-card rig,
so that both the low-frequencies & the Gamma-waves get captured
Here's an experiment I intend to do in a half-year or so, :)
maybe a bit longer, depending on resources
( it's part of a more-complex experiment, for me,
but if you beat me to the punch on this one, good for you
Find someone who can switch between *strong* Left-Brain-Mode Mind
( logic/reductionism/fixed-symbol/words ),
and *strong* Right-Brain-Mode Mind
( timless-wholeness/all-at-onceness/Totality/depth+texture/BEing ).
Or, manufacture one ( *work through*, instead of merely "reading",
"The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards, Ph.D,
and use charcoal instead of pencil, because it works better for R-Mind,
and true "toothy" sketch-paper, too: Stack the odds for victory! ).
Rig a system so that you get simultaneous EEG & Video,
then record someone sketching,
SHOWING the different brain-modes when they *can't* draw
( L-Mind, which only holds symbols, and cannot *tolerate* what-itself-is ),
and when the *can* draw ( R-Mind ),
and showing the oscillation between modes.
Many dismiss this shift as pop-psychology-BS,
but it's directly experienceable!
Anyways, I found out within this last year that
*some* people simply *can't feel* the shift from one mode to the other,
so as far as *they* are concerned, since *they* can't feel the shift,
that proves it doesn't exist!
pseudoscience, of course...
Also note that it's been mathematically-proven that any
self-consistent-system-of-knowing ( like either R-Mind or L-Mind )
can ONLY know what fits within its system, and cannot know what doesn't.
This is why anyone "educated" into blocking their R-Mind mode
( notice how *small* kids *can* draw balanced looking drawings,
but *educated* people almost always *can't*:
the *L-Mind conditioning* produced the result,
as working-through "The New Drawing..." will prove to anyone who honestly does it ).
So, if a *Westerner* puts out EEG+Video *showing* this difference,
it'll be accepted in the west, but until then...
The reason I'm going to be doing this experiment, though,
is that R-Mind is the basis of the Tibetan-style intensity-meditation
( that produces Gamma-waves ).
( notice that meditation evolved in the ideogram + visual-languages cultures .. MOAR CAFFEINE & DISTRACTIONSES!!! ...
of the East, and Westerners tend to rabidly hate/prevent stillness & tranquility,
doing EVERYthing necessary to eradicate 'em from our world
as for India being a place of ideograms or visual-languages?
Take a good look at the visual-language of the thanka/thangka paintings,
the *visual*-representations "shiva", etc. among India:
you'll see that *many* developed their R-Mind wholeness there,
in spite of their alphabetic conditioning...
Read "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" for how history shows
L-Mind made prevalent & dominant in a population produces pogrom/holocaust,
EVERY time. )
And, of course, since our MIND is our most powerful resource,
anyone who can produce a bunch of MIND-powerful people,
all committed to changing the world somehow,
is more likely to produce intended kind of effect than any equal number of "regulars", yes?
Whomever of us strikes first with the results, Win!
Others have suggested that you work on open source projects. You also indicated interest in EEG. This site has a number of open source projects that are doing good and involve serious research and development. I would look in the medical area for the most serious projects.
If I had more time and a little more electronics engineering skill I would be participating in the EKG project. Working well, it would save lives in many countries where cost of portable equipment is a major factor.
Just a thought.
...... and idiots rule the world....
You could try inventing science and/or medical sensors that would be very inexpensive to mass-produce, and share the designs with developing countries.
Medical devices are super-expensive, partly because in developed countries you have to get government approval which costs huge money. If you could produce, say, an EEG system that just plugs by USB into a cheap computer/netbook/whatever, and share the specs with the world, you might do some good.
My dad was in the hospital recently, and he had a half-dozen medical sensors connected; his pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and several other things were monitored by computer. If any reading went seriously out of spec, an alarm would sound. Could you make something like this that would be cheap enough for developing nations to build and use it? Maybe even make it WiFi so you can just set it next to each patient's bed, and one nurse with one computer could monitor all patients for alarms going off.
By the way, the sensor for pulse and blood oxygen level is a Pulse Oximeter.
You might want to research whether there is already a project to make open source/open hardware stuff for developing countries; no sense in duplicating something that someone might already be doing.
I just did a Google search, and USB oscilloscopes exist and are surprisingly cheap. I wonder if you can adapt one for medical uses?
If you are not already a software developer, and you want to write a demo app to show what your equipment can do, I suggest Python for the language on the host PC.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Plastics.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
A coming technology that is still in very early days is a desktop fabber, also called a 3D printer.
There is an open source project to make useful fabbers. Current fabbers are designed to use easily-acquired parts. I look forward to the day when someone makes a fabber that can fabricate all the parts needed to build another fabber, but that day is distant.
http://fabathome.org/
P.S. A commercial 3D printer was used to make props for Iron Man 2, including the gloves for the suit.
http://www.ecouterre.com/static/17545_iron_man.php
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
As someone who has had to endure the stress of three different sleep studies, I suggest you might
want to consider finding a new technology to replace that Godawful headset of sensors you have
to wear for the study.
You could potentially save a lot of people a lot of pain and stress. You could save the healthcare system millions,
help achieve better sleep study results, and...yes..make some good money doing it.
I'm thinking...wireless sensors....
I'd like to hear about the idea that made you lots of money.
You could probably do some quite good work with all the data floating around out there. Only requirements are a somewhat powerful computer and a descent Internet connection. Then it could be good to have access to some journals, but as more and more gets open accessed I think there is enough inspiration as well...
Good luck
Well, I thought I might answer your question instead of getting off in a tangent like a lot of people. I work on decompiling software. It's really fun. One day I'll start a blog about it to chronicle the thousands and thousands of man hours I've spent on this really cool and uncharted territory.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
What I haven't seen above is a suggestion for sources of valuable research areas.
I would check out innocentive.com to see if there is anything there which is in your field of interest.
I've made a lot of discoveries in neurofeedback, operating on myself as a guinea pig. I wouldn't entirely recommend it, BTW. The problem is, even if I find a practical cure for Alzheimer's, the medical & scientific communities will shun me. My protocol, research & trials could be flawless, but I'm an outsider. Rarely does research from the "outside" of academia get ANY acknowledgement. Often, the "real" scientists take your work, rearrange your data and then publish their own papers that essentially elaborate the exact same findings. After they steal credit for your work, they arrogantly condescend you and label you as simply "lucky" if called on it. They do this to each other too. Not all, but most... like lawyers. :p I'd recommend acquiring patents instead. Don't let the universities & journals fool you into thinking that the universe of science revolves around them. There's plenty of proper science going on behind closed doors. There was plenty going on before "them." Benjamin Franklin didn't finish high school, yet he gave birth to modern meteorology. There hasn't been a major breakthrough in the field since. If he were alive today, he'd probably be cast aside in favor of sacrificial offerings to rain gods.
Experimental evidence of transmutation of Hg into Au under laser exposure of Hg nanodrops in D2O
http://www.springerlink.com/content/711615204x0740m7/
Single Bubble Sonoluminescence
http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~pokailin/acad/72.pdf
Like computer science, experimental psychology is also still a relatively young field. Nowadays it has become less unacceptable to do research on consciousness. For now this is mostly restricted to what people are conscious of, or when they are conscious of it. Another interesting new topic is embodiment. You can do such experiments with cheap equipment. EEG would actually be pretty advanced (it has several huge advantages over fMRI that most researchers choose to ignore). What you could also do is build your own near-infrared spectroscopy setup and take a look inside your brain. Eye-movements could work if you get an infrared webcam. And I've actually done a psychophysical experiment with just a laptop, simply measuring reaction times to stimuli that no one has ever shown subjects. Good luck!
I'm interested in Computational Chemistry/Molecular Modelling with a view to drug design. I don't have anything like the resources available to the big pharma companies, but as it turns out, that doesn't matter in a hobbyist setting. Think of it as a manual equivalent of running the DrugDiscovery@Home or the old Screensaver lifesaver project ( http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html )
All the software you would need can be freely obtained as you aren't doing this commercially, although I try to use as much of my own code as possible, being the geek that I am. There's nothing to prevent people modelling proteins, docking molecules into those proteins, making toxicity predictions, and so on, with open source software and a moderately good PC.
Sure, I'll never be able to run in vitro screening, and I'll definitely never get to the stage of running a clinical trial, but I'm going to have fun at the beginning of the process. If I found myself without a job and with a spare $5-$10 million, then I'd love to take it to the next stage!
All you need is paper, pen and a huge trash can.
There is a serious lack in some sort of open source onion-redux distributed network "superwikipediabook" with how-to's, zero advertising, a free app store, a kickstarter.com-like system for users to create apps to achieve all sorts of means. Perhaps you could build up something like that?
There are piles of astronomy data that are publicly available - you just need to write the software to dig through it. I remember a few of years ago there was a paper in the top science journal Nature in which the authors found a snow/ice/dry ice outcrop on Mars that was not there in some earlier images of the area, but appeared in some of the more recent ones. All the raw images are available online, someone just had to find this needle in the haystack. So, if you have an interesting idea, you should be able to pursue it even without astronomic equipment. Btw., the original Nature article is here (if you have a subscription): http://www.nature.com/nature/foxtrot/svc/mailform?doi=10.1038/444800a&file=/nature/journal/v444/n7121/full/444800a.html The 'before' and 'after' images are available, for example, here: http://popsci.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/marswater.jpg
The state-of-the-art in self-replicating machinery is being developed primarily by hobbyists (with the odd Engineering prof here and there). See www.reprap.org for the biggest project. For the most part, all it takes money for parts, and good engineering discipline to measure, record, and refine.
An open topic that I haven't seen addressed is how to make the jump from a machine that is merely self-replicating to one that is a bona-fide Von Neumann machine; how do you make a replicator that can produce children that are slightly smaller and more accurate? How do you prevent loss of accuracy between generations?
Less theoretical open problems are in creating an architecture that can support multiple print modes, and finding good materials that are cheap, effective, and have the right properties. How can you effectively print circuit boards? Semiconductors?
It's an area that is not currently in the mainstream eye, there's not much in a business model in giving someone a machine to put you out of business, and it's in the crossroads of technology-makes-that-possible and requires-real-work-outside-of-moms-basement which makes it a target rich environment for someone that's motivated.
Having worked in high-tech research and development for many years, I now spend my time on advancing humanity by better education. Look at the olpc project, decide which type of knowledge you can contribute and delve into creating educational content about this. You will encounter great challenges, where more research is necessary to make good use of existing technology. The impact for people will be much higher than by inventing the next gadget or by discovering another effect.
There is lots of scientific progress being done in home and it would be possible to do even more, if few obstacles were removed. As noted, one of the biggest problem in doing home science is the cost of access to research knowledge. Pubmed etc, requires great deal of money to get papers out, or some connection to university with subscription. What if all of scientific knowledge, papers, reports, raw data were publicly available for everyone. Like some kind of addition to wikipedia, "wikiscience". Novadays scientific publications often obtain some sort of copyright to published papers and it reduces the chance to get this information out freely... but when you think of it, if everything was "free", science would advance much more faster.
How could "normal people" help science? For example, medicine would progress much more faster if people with certain illness could use their own brain to help solve the mystery. Often when person is diagnosed (or even long before this), his interest for his disease is greatly increased, and even normal people can have huge knowledge of this certain disease. If there was an open forum where this kind of people could ask questions from "academia", where normal people with smart brains could contradict "concensus" with hard facts, read from hundreds of papers... what would happen? One scientist is just one mind, and 100 sick people with smart questions can open whole new possibilities in research for this one scientist. Multiple sclerosis, cancers... when it's your life on the line, you'd rather find a cure than do anything else?
There are communities in internet where people have more knowledge about certain research chemicals (DRUGS!?) than scientific community itself, because certain kind of research is hard to do inside money-hungry academic circles. Human guinea pigs you might think, but they do it because they want to. Huge deal of sick people would want to be guinea pig if there was any theoretical possibility of cure even if it wouldn't be 100% safe.
So what needs to be done is offer open scientific hub which would expand at exponential rates, where every scientific paper is released, where everyone can contribute, and where everyone is peer-reviewer. Some kind of addition to wikipedia maybe? Open up the science for collective conciousness, and new ideas will flow.
And what would be academia's part in all this? To do expensive lab research, use expensive machinery to find answers to questions which will arise from the collective...
Plants and animals come by your house every day. There's always more we can learn about them.
They're free and you can do most of your observations with your eyes... no special equipment needed.
Amateur radio encourages this sort of Ben Franklin level home lab discovery. Advances in RF science come out of ham shacks all the time.
Astronomy provides a lot of opportunities for serious, significant contributions by amateurs. One way to find out if it interests you enough is to find a local amateur group that is actually regularly involved in such projects. This is not your normal stargazing or imaging groups, but groups that are carrying out observations of astronomical phenomena that the professionals don't have the time or equipment availability to do themselves. This way you can get a feel for what the activity is like and learn how to understand where it fits in the broader astronomical research spectrum before you spend anything on equipment. If you like it, you may find that your local groups already have the equipment they need or you can buy your own - cost is not too high (in the $2-5K range). I'm personally involved with a group that does exoplanet sightings, NEO object discovery, cataclysmic variable monitoring among others. We're in the east side of SF bay and find we can usually observe over half the nights here.
Just have a look here for inspiration: Makezine.
I'm in no way (apart from spiritually;) affiliated with yada yada yada
A new field with a lot of potential is research into electrical/magnetic stimulation of the brain to combat depression. Check out Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Be careful with DIY ECG/EKG. You don't want to mess up and accidentally run too much current through your heart. Be sure that you use an optical decoupler to isolate the power source from the detector. (The way this works, IIRC, is you turn the electrical signal into light using an LED, then use a photodetector to convert that back into electricity, so there is no direct path of conduction between your heart and the ECG.)
From an ivory tower, all fruit is low-hanging fruit.
There was short story about the guy who 'invented' a device that could see a dew days into the past. Though the resolution smacked of anti-Orwellian argument, the point was not social commentary about privacy, it was commentary about the hubris that seems to pervade academia (maybe I should capitalize Academia, so as not to step on peoples toes).
Nah, you have google.
Buy small work your way up. You'll be hopelessly confused with oil immersion lenses unless you get plenty of experience with something simpler first. Also you feel a lot better when you break a $100 kids scope than a semi-pro $1000 scope.
Just like astronomical telescopes, marketing says the most important thing is the magnification factor, when it's actually amongst the least. Proper illumination is not the most exciting topic, but its certainly amongst the most important.
The only thing worse than crushing a $25 lens into the surface of a slide because you haven't learned how to focus, is crushing a $250 lens into the surface of a slide...
Just like metalworking, half the group says your best bet is 50 year old classic american made glass, and half the group says buy brand new Chinese glass knowing that its at best a preassembled kit.
Just like dating (?) be sure to try everything before focusing exclusively on one topic. Low power stereo microscopes are fun. Preparing your own slides is fun. Geological is fun. Phase contrast is ph-un. Adventures in photo-mosaicing/stitching is fun. Buying weird prepared slides is fun "mitosis set" "every part of a frog" "the joy of bacteria" or whatever etc etc. Little protists are fun. Leaf sections from giant trees are fun.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No matter what you choose to study, take the time to learn Python, with an emphasis on its scientific computing packages - matsciplot, scipy, pylab, etc. There is a learning curve, but these tools are powerful and invaluable (and free). You will need to control electronics, read out data, manipulate the data, visualize data relationships and so forth. The computing makes it happen!
Alot of images are provided from different telescopes with the tools used being open source: MIDAS, IRAF etc in conjunction with free access sites like SIMBAD with programs like Stellarium with the Virgo Plugin being useful for amateurs too. All the tools are freely available to do your own data processing and/or contribute to the area
While I don't feel that I can advise you what to do, I can advise what not to do. We live in strange times, and while science in the past was often done by wealthy amateurs, it is now done mostly in university or corporate labs. Any private citizens not affiliated with such organizations will attract attention from Homeland security or whatever the equivalent is in your country (if it isn't the U.S.) I would avoid biology DIY research, likewise most chemistry research, and some physics research (i.e., rocketry) for that reason. The last thing you want to do is wind up in jail.
It has inexpensive start-up costs ($150 US) and scales nicely to ($INF US).
You can do it in your kitchen.
It is relatively simple to succeed without knowing much about the chemistry, yet you can study your ass off to learn more about water chemistry, the fermentation process, enzymatic action, agriculture, beer tasting, food pairing, you name it!
It dovetails nicely into other areas of hobbydom, such as aeroponics (to grow hops) or computer automation/hobby electronics.
It gives you an excuse to socialize (you just made beer/wine/mead!).
It has a large (and growing) community, supplies are easily obtained either at a local shop or online (ex: http://www.northernbrewer.com).
If you would rather pick up a book, check out "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing":
http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Homebrewing-Third-Harperresource-Book/dp/0060531053/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274716566&sr=8-1-catcorr
Hope you find your hobby out there!
Cheers!
www.sas.org
Find an interesting topic and just start working and learning.
>> Pretty hard if you want to darn near prove a negative, prove no human being has ever photographed that particular species of algae before. :-)
> Or, pick an area that is so obscure that it's all but certain that no one else is working on it. As a bonus, any paper you write will be seminal!
Good tip. I don't think any human being has found algae in his seminal fluid before. Good luck with that.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Turns out a lot of the coolest results in synthetic biology have been produced by teams of college students for less than $1500. See the iGEM competition http://2010.igem.org/ (and follow links to older competitions), order some biobricks from New England Biolabs http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE0546.asp , and check out the tutorials at http://syntheticbiology.org/ It's all open source, too. The price of DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis are both dropping exponentially. It's a lot like the Homebrew Computer Club times in molecular biology right now...
Yet another vote for microscope.
Sounds good. What are good resources for somebody (adult amateur layman) to get started?
This is mostly about identifying the wild plants near where I live. The necessary equipment? A cheap magnifying glass and tape measure. I use my phone camera to shoot specimens if I can't identify them on the spot. You'd be surprised how much detail you can get with a magnifying glass held in front of a cheap phone cam. There are practical benefits to local botany, as many wild specimens are edible and useful. 2 weekends ago I led some kids in the neighborhood to a huge dewberry patch. We're still eating cobbler from that. As for unique discoveries, you could collect data on the number of various species and see what changes are happening. Also people will appreciate your knowledge when camping or hiking, once you can tell a toxicodendron from a smilax.
It's great that you'd like to tinker around and play with stuff at home. You may learn some things, and it will definitely present with some interesting engineering problems. But true scientific R&D, where you discover something new, forget about it for the most part.
...
I can offer a few examples of real cutting edge science from the last 25-30 years that were/are accessible with a garage laboratory: work on chaotic/self-critical/self-organizing systems (work is still being published using simple mechanical experiments), the discovery of fullerenes, and the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Now, fullerenes were NOT discovered with simple garage-type equipment, but they could have been (high school students make fullerenes with home-built equipment these days). The last two of these discoveries/inventions even won Nobel prizes.
And bearing in mind these examples, one wonders what other major discoveries accessible to the garage lab are still out there. Sorry, can't give a roadmap for a real breakthrough. But I would judge that genomic exploration of the environment still has potential for real amateur discoveries. There is so much in the natural living world that has not been discovered, but can fall to new technologies percolating down to the amateur scientist.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Start with your mind, first - what really calls to You? Let your creativity express itself in this, and you will surely follow the path you wish.
Adhering to other people's recommendations and suggestions for something like a hobby (which is really a personal expression of the self and your interests), will cause inevitable frustration and defeat the entire purpose of having the hobby to begin with.
If you feel bio-hacking is the way to go, then just go with it - and as you make your own personal discoveries, you will inevitably develop resources and expand upon this hobby as you see fit.
Even a person who collects choo-choo trains finds new and exciting things in their own hobby, albeit mundane to the scientific community, it's still something important to Them.
Whether the aforementioned choo-choo train collector takes their love to another level only depends on the resources available at their command - and, there's virtually limitless capabilities for a devoted human to gather said resources...look at the Church for an example.
How about technology instead of science? There are lots of sorely needed gadgets. For example, a telephone-calling inactivity monitor for diabetics and seniors that calls your friends, not a $25 a month service.
I think there's a future in DIY ultrasonography-- the tech is not really all that complex, and you can probably get some used probes cheap via eBay to get started. Just be really careful if you're thinking of converting old microwave parts...
if only we geeks ruled the world. I would love to visit your geek perpetual machine museum and give u a business card for my emotional robot theatre.
Performing an EEG, ECG at home would not be too difficult at all! I run a small satalite sleep lab where I perform both as part of diagnostic and treatment sleep studies. All you would need is a decent PC (obviously you have one), 20-40 5'-6'goldcup electrodes (gold-plated, silver chloride,) an EEG/ECG recording device (such as a used or discount Compumedics E-Series device..check eBay, Amazon.com) Set up your PC and load your software and drivers, run your CAT5 and your all set up for at home EEG and ECG. EEG and ECG hook-ups are relativly easy, require minimal site prep (like alcohol), little dab of something like "Ten20" electrically conductive paste placed into the goldcups. Tape them on with something like "Cover-Roll stretch tape on the exposed skin, and use gauze over scalp sites. Make sure that the electrodes are pressed close to the skin in all locations, check impedance on each signal. The software will let you do this, avoid impedances higher than 20k or so as they will translate into poor reading quality of the EEG channels. You should have the following channels for a basic EEG: LOC,ROC,A1(M1),A2(M2),C3,C4,O1,O2,F3,F4,Ground, Reference. You can read more about this in a book called "Principles of Polysomnography" by: William H. Spriggs, BS, RPSGT. It's basically the Bible of Sleep Medicine! Also there is killer software on EEG and ECG called "Sleep Mulitmedia" they give a free demo version of their stuff on a CD-ROM, if you visit www.sleepmultimedia.com. As to buying or using EEG/EKG equipment, I would check on the legalities, shouldnt be regulated, but it might be. Using them is regulated, so you may need to look into those legalities of testing people. Good Luck! ---BTW the Polysomnography field pays well and it's lots of fun too!!!! No degree required yet, just find a company and get trained, you can take your exams later after you get some experience under your belt. Binary Sleep.com is a great forum for sleep medicine as well... enjoy!
A lot of the comments make the point that doing "real" science at home is pretty much impossible now due to the need for expensive equipment, and decades of experience. As a professional scientist I think that's nonsense. I think what people are missing is the shifting paradigm of how things are measured. I'm really excited by the possibilities suggested by (for instance) the next generation of smart phones, that hopefully might have many more sensors embedded (RFID, gas sensors, temperature/pressure)... and for the large scale distributed sensor networks that might result. The web of things, ubiquitous computing and widespread availability of cheap hardware that makes good enough (not excellent, but good enough) measurements over a wide scale are going to give professional (and amateur) scientists a whole new lever on the world. Additionally some scientific disciplines (like astronomy oddly enough) have become data rich in the last few years, I literally have tapes and discs containing data I'll likely never get round to analysing because I don't have time. Likewise for all my colleagues, who have similar piles in their offices. The arrival of the new generation of all-sky telescopes (like the LSST) which will give us access to the sky in the time-domain isn't really going to change that, it's only going to get worse in fact. All of which puts doing "real" science at home well in the reach of most (educated) amateurs.
The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Another poster mentioned amateur radio, and I would amplify that. My ham club back in the late 1970's got one of the first licenses to research "digital modes" over the air. At the time they were some of the only people sending ASCII, rather than Baudot over a radio. Later they got some of the earliest approvals to experiment with spread spectrum radio in civilian applications. These days, there are folks "rediscovering" the VLF band. There are things to do out there still.
My personal love is fragrance chemistry. Unfortunately, there does seem to be a growing anti-science bias in both legislation and popular media. As pointed out, Texas is one of the worst offenders, but it has become increasingly difficult for people anywhere to buy reagents.
We're not the only ones who suffer though, even horse lovers have been impacted by the kneejerk bans and restrictions on ELEMENTS that might someday be used as a precursor for drug syntheses. Iodine crystals are a red flag these days. If you can even find them.
Kefir and a microscope - bacterial fauna. You could, perhaps, develop bacteria by natural selection for various purposes; small scale. Might give this a go myself.
Most productive science tends to use luck so playful. Also the most dangerous. Such is life.
A blog I run for the wealth
I'm late on this, but there is some data that is free online, and other data that is available for a small fee. For instance some NASA satellites have public data archives or you can get ALL of Australia's rainfall data (over 100 years of it) for about $100. Research produces so much data that it cannot all be processed in the ways that scientists would like. I would suggest that you download data in an area you can get a handle on. Read up on the papers in that field (probably through a public library subscription) and then go and run some statistical analyses. Looking for correlations in weather patterns is always fun, astronomy is a bit more hard-core.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
I wish it was more open for the average individual to do research into the internal reality of the human experience, and how to improve it overall, fields such as psycho/neuropharmacology, general research into alternative societal structures that may lead to fuller happier lives, etc. Research into how we can all actually learn to deal with being stuck on this planet together without killing each other, and perhaps someday with actually turning to our neighbor in need and helping just because, knowing at the very least we may someday need it ourselves.