I am from Prague in the Czech Republic, there's a local hackerspace. We're the first hackerspace in the Czech Republic. We're a non-profit, run by the community. We do not have any funding. We're community run, everything we run, we have to get money from our own pockets. We're working on this.

We have about 40 members now. The main focus is on electronics, programming, security, so we have a lot of software engineers and a lot of electronics geeks. But also some people interested in science in general. We have mathematicians, physics students, and also me and a couple of others have setup a .. project.

We are interested in biology projects. We have some space, and it's sufficient because there's a few people. None of us are professional biologists. I am a new student. We have me and .. they are the most interested in microbiology and molecular biology. We haven't done any of those projects. Tomas and ATA are very active in brain hacking, they have their own equipment, their own but they are cooperating now. They do sensory augmentation and some cognitive physiology which is one of their projects they will talk about.

We have done a lot of low-tech experimetns. What do you do with no money and no equipment? You do everything you can with things in your kitchen or things for a few bucks. So we built a laser microscope using just a laser pointer, and if you use water droplet you can see what's inside like magnification. Chlorophyll extraction is pretty easy. Also sensory augmentation was a point of interest. Basically just stuck magnets to our fingers so we can feel electromagnetic fields with that.

Most of our projects are related to electronics. I am trying to get the biology projects more interesting. The outcome for instance is this digital microscope that we used. A digital microscope you could buy, and we augmented these reprap parts, and made some customer software and did arduino, put more pictures together to make the image bigger, etc.

We are doing a DIY centrifuge, because the chlorophyll extraction required a centrifuge. We grabbed the nearest thing on the table, which was a harddrive, so we used some duct tape and stuck the tubes to the harddrive, it took my friend's finger off almost, but we're working on it. We reprapped this thing, we stick the tubes on so you don't have to stick them on with ducktape. We have speed control and everything, up to 6000 rpm but probably more evnetually.

My main project is sorta steampunkish. This was a cooperation with the local academy of sciences, in the memory/physiology department. She gave a talk about experiments on rats, like how they, uh, orient themselves in their environment and so on, so we worked together to do an operant conditioning chamber for them. It works where you stick a rat inside, or operant conditioning, you beep for a mnute or 30 seconds, and you try to find out whether the rat can distinguish between these intervals. There are slots where the rat can stick it nose in, and there are some sensors to determine if the rat has stuck its nose in or not. The reward is sweet water. We've been working on this for a long time, it was already in the news. There will probably be a paper published about that.

Then we have a biofeedback lab, which is mostly what ATA and Tomaz are working on. They couldn't come with me, so I am trying to represent what they are doing. They have a lot of equipment, second hand and bought with their own money. you will see al ist of stuff: tdcs, ultrasonography, pulse oxymetry, wireless EEG, and Denisa Kera had some interesting ideas about sharing the data, like fMRI, or you can get a lot of data out on biofunctions. She had this idea to share it with others, so we will talk about this tomorrow. Ok great.

We do plan to extendi..

https://brmlab.cz/project/biolab irc.freenode.net #brmlab

jenda pasky, tomas, ATA, iva, chido