Much like plants can turn carbon into energy, researchers have been striving to scale the potential of photocatalytic CO2 reduction. Promising as the technology may be, little progress has been made to scale its potential. If the net human-caused CO2 reduction target of 45 % from 2010 levels is to be reached by 2030, the science must be shared. Tha…

Did you know that honey bees dance? When honey bees return to the colony from foraging, they share info about their journey with their fellow honey bees by dancing. Besides getting the boogie on, however, little is known about how far honey bees go foraging and what ecological factors impact their journey, e.g. pesticide exposure. In this episode o…

The advancement of low-cost sensors has sparked a boom in air quality monitoring devices. From backpack add-ons to citizen bicycles, air quality devices are enabling citizens to get involved in monitoring local air quality. When looking at global air quality maps, however, the data for South America and Africa remain scarce. As primarily consumer-b…

What if research labs didn't have to reinvent the wheel all the time? Rodents like mice and rats play a pivotal role in neuroscientific research. Through a process known as 'head fixation', scientists surgically implant cannulas and electrodes to measure neurophysiological activity. As mice share roughly 95% of our DNA, head fixation experiments gr…

Did you know that our understanding of basic functions such as memory, learning and sleep is largely thanks to a giant sea slug? For more than 50 years, Aplysia Californica, a type of slug also known as the California Sea Hare, has been important for understanding how the nervous system works and for investigating the cellular and molecular basis o…

Urgent needs require urgent solutions, but is open-source always the answer? The UN aims to eradicate malaria in all countries by 2030. However, in some parts of the world, incidents are increasing as the parasites transmitting the disease grow increasingly tolerant to treatment drugs. A novel treatment method using microwaves to kill the parasite …

How inclusive are advanced prosthetics technologies? The global demand for prosthetics and orthotics is only expected to rise. Yet, access to affordable and innovative solutions varies greatly at local, national and international levels. And while 3D printing has greatly contributed to making prosthetics available in low-income and developing regio…

What does it take to make research catch up with climate change? The Arctic regions hold crucial information about the environmental impact of rising temperatures. Calving glaciers and treacherous territories make it a life-threatening mission to collect it though. As autonomous technologies improve, drones, boats and rovers are increasingly being …

Why did high-tech farming go bust? Vertical Farming was one of the big new technologies of the early 2010s. By growing crops vertically with less water and no pesticides, big vertical farms promised to revolutionise food production. So why are the same vertical farms going bust across Europe and the US just ten years after they boomed? In this epis…

Welcome to a new HardwareX podcast series: Open Hardware Talks. In addition to our regular episodes exploring open-source hardware projects, we're launching a new deep-dive series. Open Hardware Talks explores key concepts of open-source hardware in casual conversations with experts and practitioners from across the ecosystem. For the first episode…

How can we make life-saving medical equipment more accessible in areas under blockade, with low infrastructure, or with limited resources? In a time where almost every region in the world is seeing a rise in conflict, tourniquets have become increasingly necessary for avoiding excessive civilian casualties. Yet, proprietary tourniquets remain large…

In this episode, we talk to the creators of Studio HILO that offers open source technologies for local yarn production, along with remote workshops and vocational training to facilitate user-driven experimentation. Our three guests are Sara Diaz Rodriguez (co-founder of Studio HILO, textile design and technologies consultant), Natalija Krasnoperova…

In this fourth episode of HardwareX Season 2 podcasts, our guest is Chet Udell who is an Assistant Professor of Biological and Ecological Engineering at Oregon State University (USA). Dr. Udell is the Director of the Openly Published Environmental Sensing (OPEnS) lab at his university. His lab is an NSF and USDA funded Makerspace led by a staff of …

In this third episode of HardwareX Season 2 podcasts, our guest is Katrina Laganovska from the Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia, Riga LV-1063, Latvia . She is the first author of an HardwareX article titled “Portable low-cost open-source wireless spectrophotometer for fast and reliable measurements” along with co-authors Aleks…

In this second episode of HardwareX Season 2 podcasts, our guest is Diego Lagos-Susaeta who is affiliated with the Centre for Biotechnology and Bioengineering (CeBiB), Department of Chemical Engineering, Biotechnology and Materials, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile. Our guest is the first author of an HardwareX article titled “openPFGE: An open…

In this first episode of HardwareX Season 2 podcasts, our new host is Dr. Sanli Faez who is the Assistant Professor (tenured) of Physics at Utrecht University. Our guests are Dr. Joshua Pearce and Dr. Todd Duncombe who are the Editors-in-Chief of HardwareX and have edited the Special Issue: COVID-19 Medical Hardware. We also invite Dr. Santosh Pand…

In this episode of HardwareX podcast, we talk to Professor Joshua Pearce who is the co-Editor-in-Chief of HardwareX. Dr. Pearce is the Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation, cross-appointed in the Richard Ivey School of Business and Western University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Pearce is a renowned ex…

In this episode of HardwareX podcasts, we talk to Todd Duncombe who is the co-Editor-in-Chief of HardwareX. Todd is a Postdoctoral researcher at the renowned ETH Zurich, Department of BioSystems Science and Engineering in Basel, Switzerland. He has published several impactful papers and inventions on Droplet Microfluidic, Analytical Chemistry, Mass…

In this episode of HardwareX podcasts, we talk to Sarah Jenkins who is the Publishing Director at Elsevier. She is currently located at Oxford, UK. Sarah has served Elsevier in various capacities over the past 19 and a half years, and has led many successful projects at Elsevier. It is an absolute pleasure to chat with Sarah on her initiatives and …

In this episode of HardwareX podcasts, our guests are Dr. Marcel Bentancor and Dr. Horacio Failache from Montevideo, Uruguay. Their research interests are in Optics and Experimental Physics. In February 2021, their team published a paper in HardwareX titled “LUCIA: An open source device for disinfection of N95 masks using UV-C radiation”. The paper…

In this episode of HardwareX podcasts, we talk to Dr. Joong Ho Shin and Won Han. Dr. Shin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Pukyong National University, South Korea. Dr. Shin is an expert in microfluidics, lab-on-a-chip, biosensors, diagnostic devices, biotechnology and molecular biology. His work has been publi…

In this episode of HardwareX podcasts, we talk to Pete Marchetto who is a Research Engineer and Instrumentation Scientist with Conservify, and Principal at Sensing, LLC. His research interests lie in environmental sensing, and creating tools for those in the life sciences who need them. Some of his projects have included applying automated imaging …

In this episode of HardwareX podcasts, we talk to Andrew Hill and Peter Prince from Open Acoustic Devices, which is a UK-based company that designs, supports and deploys open-source acoustic hardware and software for our user community, as well as our own environmental and wildlife monitoring projects. In October 2019, their team published a paper …

In this episode of HardwareX podcasts, we talk to Dr. Matheus Carvalho who is a Senior Research Associate at the Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia. He is affiliated with the Centre for Coastal Biogeochemistry Research, Environmental Analysis Laboratory, and Southern Cross Analytical Research Services. His research interests ha…