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As many other things that are being decentralized with the advent of the internet, so is research. One of the very things being decentralized is the funding source for research projects.

In here are some examples of tools that can be used to share/store data collected. Published a paper and think that people would benefit from looking at the raw data? Want to make that data that has been stored for years useful?

Katharina and Alex are developing a classic PCR machine: 16 samples and a heated lid. You can find more details of their project here Here is a demo video:

DremelFuge is a very simple and clever centrifuge, buit perhaps not the safest one (be careful if you end up using it!). It takes advantage of 3d printing technology to print an adaptor that goes on to a Dremel (a precision tool that has really high rotation rates).

Fiji is a distribution of ImageJ. The idea of the developers is to make the life of scientists easier by bundling ImageJ with nicely organised plugins and auto update function.

It is great that there are other interesting projects out there that are also concerned with making science available to more people! Here is a short list of projects I came across.

NeuroElectro wants to extract information about neuron types, morphology, electrophysiology properties from papers, using text mining algorithms and gathers them in a database. Our goal is to facilitate the discovery of neuron-to-neuron relationships and better understand the role of functional diversity across neuron types.

OpenBCI is a complete open source EEG system that can be built either on top of an Arduino (8-bit system), or on top of chipKIT (32-bit system), which gives the system more local memory and allows for faster speeds.

The openEEG project aims at describing and putting manuals for building a two channel EEG system for about U$200. More on instructions on how to build one, can be found here.

World Wide Series Seminar Open Ephys is a great initiative to create a suite that encompasses hardware for LFP and spiking recording, optogenetics combined with custom written software for microstimulation, environmental stimuli, extracellular recording and optogen.