3-D printers

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3-D Printing Could Offer Savings On Replica Lab Kit

Working replicas of expensive scientific equipment could be made for a fraction of conventional cost using cheap 3-D printers, possibly saving developing world labs thousands of dollars each time, says a researcher whose book on the subject was published last year. This and similar advances mean the age of appropriate technology — affordable, sustainable solutions designed and built to meet local needs — may be here, argues Joshua Pearce, a materials science and engineering professor at Michigan Technological University, United States, in an article in Physics World magazine.

Rice U. Lab Creates Open-Source Optogenetics Hardware, Software

Press Release | Rice University | November 7, 2016

Nobody likes a cheater, but Rice University bioengineering graduate student Karl Gerhardt wants people to copy his answers. That’s the whole point. Gerhardt and Rice colleagues have created the first low-cost, easy-to-use optogenetics hardware platform that biologists who have little or no training in engineering or software design can use to incorporate optogenetics testing in their labs. Rice’s Light Plate Apparatus (LPA) is described in a paper available for free online this week in the open-access journal Scientific Reports...

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VCs Should Back Gadgets For The Sick, Not The Healthy, Doctors Say

Emily Wax-Thibodeaux | Venture Capital Dispatch | October 16, 2014

Investors have been lining up to invest in consumer-facing health products, as wearable trackers and health apps have taken off with consumers.  But these digital-health products—widely used today by people who are already healthy—are subject to the same boom-and-bust cycle that has become the norm in other areas of technology...

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Why Now Is A Great Time To Consider A Career In Open Source Hardware

Twenty years or so ago, almost no one even knew what open source hardware was, let alone planned a career around it. In 2000, for example, out of the more than 2 million academic papers published that year in the entire world, only seven articles even mentioned "open source hardware" at all. When I first wrote Open-Source Lab, I'd collected every example (only a few dozen) and could easily keep up and read every open hardware article that got published to post them on a wiki. I am happy to report that is no longer physically possible. There have already been over 1,500 articles that discuss "open source hardware" this year, and I am sure many more will be out by year's end. Open source hardware is now a field of its own, with a few journals dedicated to it specifically (for example, HardwareX and the Journal of Open Hardware). In a wide range of fields, dozens of traditional journals now routinely cover the latest open hardware developments.