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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?"
... 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.
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.
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
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
Amusingly, Texas is particularly bad. In addition to "controlled substances", they have "controlled glassware". You need the permission of the state to own such sinister items as Erlenmeyer flasks.
Luckily, they can still wave "don't tread on me" flags with impunity, so it's ok...
Even if science isn't illegal by itself, good luck not getting arrested for buying lab glassware, which is illegal in TX (you might make a meth lab), and good luck getting any chemical companies to sell you anything but table salt unless your a big company (sodium sulfite is so dangerous afterall), and good luck not having the BATF break down your door and shoot your children and dog because you violated some obscure bullshit 'manufacturing a weapon/bomb/scary looking thing that we don't know what it is/flyswatter' law.
I have tons of lab glassware, scary sounding chemicals like potassium ferricyanide and benzotriazole, lots of white powder and digital scales to measure them, high powered power supplies, RF and electronics equipment, lasers, casks of gunpowder and stockpiles of lead and bullets, and more stuff that would make for damn fine TV on the evening news--"Potential terrorist killed in struggle with police--an arsenal of weapons, dangerous chemicals that could be used for chemical weapons, bomb making materials, and communications equipment for communicating with terrorists across the globe were siezed....
My hobbies are photography, shooting/reloading, robotics, and radio.
It's a dangerous world for people that do anything interesting or innovative. In complete seriousness, be careful.
The GP may have put it badly, but he does have a point: you don't go out looking for something to do to "make a significant discovery." You try a few things, find something you like, and do it. If you do it really well, maybe you'll find something novel.
The amateur planet and supernova finders didn't go out and buy a telescope because they wanted to find planets and get their names in journals, they were already accomplished amateur astronomers and started looking for planets or supernovae for the challenge.
You've hit on kind of the sweet spot there. I agree with you that the scientific world seems to have had many of its boundaries pushed beyond the capacity of the average home experimenter, but the artistic world has no such boundaries. Fun and artistic electromechanical toys and hacks are still novel. Look at shows like Burning Man, sites like hackaday, magazines like Make:. They're filled with people interested in the act of creation. And last night my brother-in-law introduced me to Farm Show magazine (farmshow.com) which is a compendium of hacks and homebuilt machines that farmers have created out of necessity and imagination. It has a lot of really cool homemade things in it.
And if you're looking to monetize it, handmade and homemade mechanical equipment has a very visceral appeal to a lot of people. The potential to sell a unique device is high. And you can get involved for any amount of money, from repurposing junk bits from broken VCRs to building a nicely equipped machine shop.
John
That's what I get for posting before morning coffee... :)
Yes, the post was probably a bit hard-nosed, but I'm glad you recognized my point: it's what interests you that takes you to interesting places. There are two kinds of achievers: 1) Those that work hard at something, and 2) those that work hard as something that interests them. The latter benefit from the leverage of intrinsic motivation.
For my situation, I modify #2 slightly: Those that work hard at what comes easy to them. I am definitely a poster child for that... well, delete "work hard" and replace with "piddle at"...
Obligatory non-attorney forum safe harbor clause from Ohio: You may need some kind of EPA or local permit for certain stuff, I have a metal finishing lab in my "laboratory" barn as that's my business, and it's where I test some ideas. I needed a permit from Ohio EPA, it was a total B**ch to get, but I really only needed it to make Sigma Aldrich happy. OEPA was mostly annoyed by my requests since I'm not a significant source of anything. It's really just a small fume hood, laboratory bench, power supply and beakers, but it works.
However, every summer I go through about 3 gallons of Clorox bleach per week for my pool, along with other household chemicals that could look specious to some people. Hey, a guy wants his pool to be comfortable.
Other than some weird looks from Walmart employees, I haven't had the Feds knocking on my door, and if they did I'd invite them to a cool dip in my crystal clear water heated by my DIY solar exchanger. After that they can take a look at my hydroponics lab with many gallons of nasty chemicals - such as Ammonia, HCL and various nitrates. On my bench in the greenhouse there's enough glassware to make any meth-manufacturer blush, all ordered from China via e-bay many times without so much as a what-for from anyone.
While they try to figure out what laws I may have broken, they can indulge on the myriad of nuts, citrus, and other good stuff I've got growing in northern Ohio. And before they leave I'd be happy to treat them to a rocket launch or two, as everyone loves those.
Long story short, it's still a mostly free country for the intrepid individual. Perhaps a survey course in physics, chemistry or biology at a local college is in your future?
IMO, and experience, any hobby that turns serious will burn your bank account like a NASA moon shot. If your married, I hope your wife is understanding, or at least has a separate bank account... otherwise you and your family may starve because of that last experiment you've got cooking in the barn.
A wonderful way to be a real hero in aquaculture right now would be to figure out how to discourage overrunning of popular native game and commercial fish by less desirable invasive species in the wild.
Snakehead are a real problem in the Southeastern US and silver carp are having a terrible effect in the Midwest. Snakehead are aggressive towards other fish, towards frogs, turtles, and all sorts of other creatures, and both parents protect the brood, too. They also have crude air-breathing capabilities so they can live in oxygen-poor water and move easily through shallows. Silver carp are better filter-feeders than native species, mass in huge numbers, and are actually a bit dangerous to small boats. They grow to about 40 pounds and all tend to jump out of the water as boats approach. Boats get damaged, and people in small boats have been knocked overboard.