Some of the writers on LabOnTheCheap have recently moved to UC Santa Barbara, where the Chemistry department sells us dry ice like this: That’s right, as 10 lb blocks. There aren’t any of those dry ice grinders, or any tools of any sort, around, so to get dry ice in a reasonable size, you’ve gotta […]
Category: Commercial Products
Frugal Science in the Age of Curiosity – Manu Prakash
A couple weeks ago we posted about Punch Card Programmable Microfluidics, and long before that we posted about an early version of the Foldscope and we posted on my personal favorite of the bunch, the paperfuge. All of these are projects of Dr. Manu Prakash, whom we recently saw talk at the Marine Biological Laboratory […]
Touchscreen Platforms for Rodents
Here’s an interesting paper about designing a low-cost touchscreen operant chamber using a raspberry pi. Perhaps the most important takeaway here is that rats performed twice as well in the Med Associates commercial chamber. Commercial products are often more refined than DIY solutions and this is just a great reminder of the trade-off we have to think […]
Using Pressure Cookers as Autoclaves
An autoclave, even a very small one, typically costs ~$4000. If you find yourself needing one, there’s a very old standby. For small batches of agar plates or low-volume media, you can use a pressure cooker, those wonderful commercial devices that cost ~$100. Here’s one tutorial and a quick search yields plenty of others as […]
Little UV Magnifiers
On Amazon you can buy these “60x” magnifying lenses for around $6. If the quotations didn’t tip you off, they are not 60x, we bought a couple different types and in general found them to be between 5x to 10x magnifying lenses with pretty intense spherical aberrations. However if that was all there was to […]