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The Open Microscopy Environment is a collaborative project between several labs. They are developing file formats and software standards for light microscopy. Within the project they have BIO-formats, a Java library for reading and writing data.

Linux is an open source operating system and it is the major OS used in servers and supercomputers. Ubuntu, one of the best known distributions has been gaining space in the personal computing scene, now days already being factory shipped by major manufacturers.

Ever thought about making soft robots? The folks at Super-Releaser have, and they are doing very cool projects! Some for medical applications and some for research purposes. Check one of their cool robots below:

The 5 dollar PCR machine is a project from David Ng. he created a very interesting design for the PCR machine. Instead of using eppendorfs, he is using teflon tubes and three different heating elements, which allows for cheaper (he has a working PCR machine for 5 dollars!

The Open bionics project was inspired by the Yale open hand project, aiming to develop light, affordable, and modular robot hands and myoelectric prosthesis. Also they want to make them easy to replicate using off the shelf materials.

With the rise of low cost 3D printers, and other cheap manufacturing tools, the field of robotics and prosthetics has been gaining quite a few open source projects. Two very nice compilations can be found at openrobot hardware and at Soft robotics toolkit.

Backyard brains started out producing low cost, portable, electrophysiology systems to bring neuroscience to classrooms and help promote it. “Backyard brains wants to be for neuroscience, what the telescope is for astronomers” – meaning that the idea is that with a couple of hundred dollars anyone can get one of these recording systems and start doing experiments, like amateur astronomers can buy telescopes and start observing the cosmos.

This neat little project uses some plexi-glass, lens extracted from a laser pointer to harvest the power of smartphone cameras for some very big amplifications! Yoshinok manged to see cell plasmolysis and some other cool features with it.

Addgene is a non-profit company that makes the share of plasmids easier by making a plasmid database and linking them to the papers where they were described. In this way they take on the job of maintaining plasmids and shipping them to requesting scientists.

The Brain Map is one of the initiatives of the Allen Institute. It is a data portal that encompasses different projects: the Allen Institute has created a set of large-scale programs to understand the fundamentals of the cortex.