Scientific R&D At Home? 398
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?"
Do what you enjoy... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Help start the revolution! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Help start the revolution! (Score:3, Informative)
Robots is interesting with a bit of AI thrown in too.
But also have a look at http://diybio.org/ [diybio.org] for some biology related projects
Re:Do what you enjoy... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Arrest! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What are the chances? (Score:4, Informative)
The probability of a scientists making a significant discovery in his lab isn't much better than zero. The Flemming "Gee this moldy stuff might kill germs" is not even a once-in-a-career moment for the vast majority of scientists. Scientists work in a community, and the majority of them advance that community by applying tiny deltas to the scientific consensus.
I think if you want to be an amateur scientist, you might find it most rewarding to choose a branch of science with an enthusiastic amateur community, such as comet hunting or meteorology.
Re:Help start the revolution! (Score:4, Informative)
Phidgets [phidgets.com] If you would like a bit of an easier ride.
Version 2.0 of their Phidgets SBC is going to be really slick, but don't expect it anytime soon.
Re:Astronomy! (Score:5, Informative)
In all fairness, if you want to make a contribution that is worth co-authorship of a paper, you might need at least a good amateur telescope (maybe on the order of 10 inch aperture) and a CCD camera.
With such equipment, and clear skies, you can do photometric monitoring of stars (e.g. for outbursts, or planet transits). Asronomers always have the problem that big observatories focus on big telescopes, and it's difficult to do things that require small telescopes, but long-term monitoring.
One example would be monitoring of the transits of extrasolar planets, to detect timing anomalies (which could be caused by undetected additional planets). Or monitoring stars with planets detected by radial velocity variations, to discover eventual transits. Or monitoring of ongoing gravitational lens events... there are quite a few oportunities for amateurs.
Re:What are the chances? (Score:5, Informative)
For every Edison, Tesla and others, there are thousands and thousands of unknown people.
Make your sleep lab (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I've often pondered... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know, the progress of competing wart removers
I really like your idea, but I want to make a comment on the difficulty of this one. I had three warts that I wanted to remove, but I wasn't sure how well the salicylic acid would work, so I only tried it on one of them. Weird thing is, as soon as it worked on one, the other two warts disappeared on their own, without anything. So to be sure, you would want to apply the treatments on different people. Maybe you could do an internet request to find people who have warts, want to get rid of them, and are willing to go along with the experiment.
Incidentally, compound-w freeze off actually made my warts bigger. Stay away from that stuff. (YMMV)
Re:Days of Garage Inventor long gone(if ever exist (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Arrest! (Score:2, Informative)
The Texas Department of Public Safety - Narcotics Service requires a form to be filled out before one starts a chemistry lab at home (or anywhere else).
ftp://ftp.txdps.state.tx.us/forms/nar-120a.pdf [state.tx.us]
Re:CS is an awesome field for this.... (Score:2, Informative)
More generally, mathematics is an excellent field for amateurs, with tons and tons of accessible problems that can be solved with persistence. Check out some of Martin Gardner's books.
Brian Hayes has some similar explorations (http://bit-player.org/).
Re:Einstein had no lab (Score:4, Informative)
However their result was not totally unexpected, as the Maxwell equations themselves already predicted such a thing, paradoxically, by containing a velocity term c. In the Newton/Galileo worldview, x and dx/dt, position and speed are undetectable, relative (even though Newton did talk about moving through "absolute space" when spinning a bucket of water, but Galileo did not, when telling about the flies not gathering aft in a ship, or his measurements of dropping feathers in a vacuum, or from the leaning tower of Pisa, countering Aristotle's claim that motion, dx/dt is consumed, and correctly ascribing that to friction, to external forces.) Only d2x/dt2, acceleration is revealed by the Universe, as a (inertial) force. Newtons mechanics, his laws, is all about forces, about d2x/dt2. All Einstein did was incorporate the Maxwell equations with this previous idea of Galileo about the relativity of inertial reference frames, that still did check out through the Michelson et.al. experiment, force a system where even with c present there is still inertial relativity and only acceleration manifests itself, and show that the classical Newton/Galileo system was a special limiting case of the old one. It's all really simple if you're willing to give up your prior convictions based on new experimental facts, even if those convictions were related to the most basic of basic things in your image of the world around you, to x and t.
Special Equipment (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Astronomy! (Score:4, Informative)
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GP is correct. The long term monitoring for exoplanets was done at professional observatories, but using what are now considered "small" telescopes, equivalent to large-ish amateur telescopes . But there is only so much money and so much professional manpower for these. Amateurs with a good location, telescope and camera and some care can indeed contribute to real, published research, monitoring comets, asteroids, variable stars of all types, exoplanets and stars which might have exoplanets, or looking for supernovae. It's a very good field for amateurs.
here are some (non-exhaustive) examples and discussion:
http://www.aavso.org/aavso/about/pro_am.pdf [aavso.org]
(disclaimer: I am a professional astronomer)
use what you already have (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Absolutely (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Arrest! (Score:3, Informative)
I use my own common sense practices. The thing is most of the stuff I work on at home is downright harmless (low voltage DC, simple photochemicals) compared to what I use at work (hydroflouric acid, high-voltage ac and RF)
Harmless compared to Hydrofluoric Acid? Gosh, I sure hope so!
HF is an extremely scary substance. Make cyanide look like Kool Aid by comparison!
ham radio (Score:3, Informative)
Don't kill yourself with ECG (Score:3, Informative)
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.)
Re:Special Equipment (Score:2, Informative)