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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?"
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.
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.
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.
I don't know the answer. The areas of science that I could imagine practicing at home are well trodden. That's not going to stop me from making electromechanical things for fun, but I don't expect to change the the world with it.
Seriously, they have some great biological modules to investigate ;)
Sorry, home science is now an arrestable offense.
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio and http://www.ettus.com/ see also http://kks.cabal.fi/GNUSaunaradioaallot :P
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.
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
William, Shatner, is that, you ?
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.
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
Try self-trepanning and see what's on your mind!
Three Squirrels
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.
Almost all new comets are (or at least were) discovered via amateurs scanning the skies. Sure, today there are the automated telescopes scanning the skies, but they can't cover everything.
Amateur astronomers are very important to astronomy. Professionals deal with their studies and cosmology and planetary science. They don't have that much time to actually *look* at the universe. You can do lots of good astronomy even with basic equipment. For example, lunar grazing events.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grazing_lunar_occultation
As for EEG/ECG and sleep labs and crap like that? Well, the only downside to that is you have limited subjects to experiment on!! But science is science and there is *never* going to be such a thing as "all discoveries were made already, so no use in trying".
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...
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.
I don't think this guy is just "spouting shit." I think he's a bot. A damn good one. I'd say he passed the Turing test based on your response, but not based on mine. I think the flaw is a general lack of structure.
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.
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'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
A space elevator is a straightforward materials problem. Make the right material, the problem is solved. Current candidates for materials include carbon nanotubes. Which, among other places, can be found in candle soot. I wouldn't rule out the garage as a source for ground breaking discoveries here.
AI... again, all you need is a PC that can address lots of RAM, and a goodly amount of RAM. Guaranteed. I may be overestimating the amount of RAM. Go ahead, ask me why. I love that question. :)
Fusion... you can put a fusion reaction on your desktop with a Farnsworth Fusor. Look it up. You can build a high powered laser. Water is readily available. Who's to say what you can, and cannot, do? I'm not saying you could make a commercially viable reactor (or that you couldn't), but I am saying that you might find a fundamental reaction or process.
Artificial meat... this field is *definitely* ripe (hah!) for garage work. It consists of getting cells to grow outside the body. In order to be practical, it *requires* that the process be simple. We already know how to culture in a small plate; we know how to stimulate muscles so they have tone; so a lot of research is concentrated on how to scaffold the cells and this may turn out to be very simple - can't say until its done - but again, nothing about it screams "not in the garage."
And nothing about them says you can't have an idea and chase venture capital, either. The bottom line is that these are presently unsolved problems that need solutions, and none of them are either impossible or even unlikely. Fusion? Look up. Space elevator? The math works. Ai? You're intelligent, so we know it can be done at least one way. Artificial meat -- almost the same answer.
Yet each of these presents an industry-launching potential, reputation, fame, money, service... the world is full of things like this. But every time you look at something and go "aw, can't do THAT without a lab, you fulfill your own expectations. Einstein did his most interesting work while employed as a patent clerk. Many discoveries came about as accidental consequences of other work. Not saying you can't discover stuff with a huge staff and a big budget, I'm just saying it's no certainty that you have to have them. Finally, given the right intellectual gifts, you may figure it out with zero lab work at all. Clarke worked out geostationary satellites with no particular lab work.
Speaking as an engineer, I've worked on problems and had at least four (that I recall) of them spring, as far as I could tell, completely solved into my mind after a good sleep, while driving, and once while walking into the kitchen. The only thing remaining for each of those four ideas was implementation using well known and rather vanilla techniques and/or parts. But all of those ideas were new, commercially viable, and served me *extremely* well.
One was specific to ham radio and while it got me mentioned in the "Amateur Radio Handbook" and won me some awards, didn't make a whole lot of money.
One of them (in the realm of dithering palettes for color) remains the best approach, by far, that I've ever been able to find, but has few applications today because images created through color palettes are generally obsolete.
Another was so obscure and specific that the market for it only existed as long as a certain set of other-party hardware was being sold. But it was a hell of a money maker.
The remaining one continues to pay off today, almost ten years after it popped into my head and I almost drove off the road. I spent the next hour babbling about it to my long-suffering and ultra loyal ladyfriend, who was at the time a captive audience as we were driving about three hours to visit her kids. Today, she lives in a fully paid off, 5,000 sq foot home with me, bought with income leveraged with that idea. And she drives the car she always wanted, also fully paid off. Apparently it was worth it. :)
So my personal experience tell
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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
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.
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...
Amateur radio encourages this sort of Ben Franklin level home lab discovery. Advances in RF science come out of ham shacks all the time.
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.)
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.
>> 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