#shdv18

[technariumas]

Science Hack Day Vilnius registration is open!

Everyone is welcome: scientists, artists, engineers, students or just anyone curious about science & hacking. The two-day event is entirely free to attend -- bring your curiosity with you!

[technariumas]

Another Science Hack Day Vilnius concludes with a bang! (no - literally)

Science Hack Day Vilnius has just taken place at Technarium, for the second year in a row. This time it was bigger, better and… more explosive!

Head over to the Science Hack Day Vilnius blog to read about the 20(!) teams that took part!

[seplute]

SCOBY hacking at SHDV18!

Our team “The Smell of Science” hacked SCOBY during Science Hack Day Vilnius 2018!! (And claimed the “Best Science Hack” award!!)

We started with an idea to make biodegradable Xmas wrap, which quickly evolved to biodegradable t-bags, t-bag based SCOBY culture starters, vegan dumplings & sausages and more 😅

See the protocols we used, especially for tea bags (which worked best of all!) below.

And here’s the video we made about the entire process for the final presentation of our hack (thanks to Vi.Zo! 😊):

Here’s a quick summary of the SCOBY material preparation “protocols” for wrapping paper, tea bags & vegan sausages !

Correction. It’s actually 1 cup of sugar for that amount of water ^. We grew our SCOBY in a large plastic box for ~2 weeks. It was about ~1cm thick.

That worked really well for making wrapping paper ^. You need to oil the drying SCOBY sheet (we used ~1:1 warm coconut oil & olive oil mixture).

Don’t use untreated metal grids for drying the SCOBY! It has lots of acid & oxidates metal, which is why it changes color and becomes this ew-looking thing!

Beetroot is a good natural way to dry the SCOBY !

Tea bags were produced as follows:

1) dry freshly recovered SCOBY sheet on cool air for ~1 hr so it loses >50% of water, but is still wet. The texture of it should be similar to removed human or animal skin 😬

2) cut pieces of SCOBY of preferred size, and sew them into a teabag shape, leaving one edge open. (Ever sown human or animal skin? This will feel the same!)

3) fill the bag with preferred tea and sew the bag together completely. Leave extra thread.

4) dry the tea bag by hanging it in front of a source of hot air (blow dryer, air heater etc.)

5) keep an eye on your tea bag so it doesn’t over-dry. Up to 1 hr should be enough to turn it into a tea bag-looking thing without it getting overly dry & brittle.

6) poke holes into the teabag with a needle.

7) fill a cup with nearly boiling water (~90 C) & dip your teabag in it! Make sure not to leave it too long, because the bag will absorb too much water and start melting. But it should not do so before your tea is ready!

8) the teabag might have a slight SCOBY smell (kinda fruity & a bit acidic), but the tea shouldn’t !

If it fails - try again !! 😜 (and don’t forget to report that failure somewhere, as well as the successes!)

😊 P.S. yes, SCOBY smells. Yes, that’s the smell of science.

😅

[technariumas]

Preparing for Science Hack Day!

N2 crew are rehearsing all sorts of explosions for their show on Sunday:

Meanwhile, the silkscreening team just finished 120 handmade T-shirts:

[technariumas]

Welcoming speakers & mentors of Science Hack Day Vilnius 2018

We're very excited to have some awesome DIY science & open science practitioners and advocates coming to Science Hack Day Vilnius 2018, all doing amazing work and research. Each speaker will present ~10 minute talk on their work & ideas on open science. They will also be mentoring hackathon participants throughout the weekend, so grab them if you think they can help you with your project idea!

[Ieva from M-LAB, mentoring at the previous SHDV]

First of all, we will have Lucy Patterson - one of the organizers of Science Hack Day Berlin, who gave us the idea to organize our own Science Hack Day in the first place! Lucy is a freelance science hacker, community organiser, an active advocate for DIY science: the practice or application of science outside of an institutional context, typically for civic or cultural purposes. She is part of the Berlin collective space and community, Lacuna Lab, focussed on hybrid art practices involving science and technology, and usually works as a freelance event organiser and community manager. She lives in Berlin but is originally from the UK, and has a background in molecular biology.

Yo Yehudi is joining us from Cambridge. Yo runs Code is Science, a project working to promote the importance of open source code in science. She's also a 2018 Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a recent Mozilla Open Leadership program graduate, and by day she works as a software engineer on the open source project InterMine, based at the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. Yo was "recruited" for Science Hack Day Vilnius during the last Mozilla festival, MozFest2017 😎

Margaret Gold is also joining us from the UK. Margaret is a mobile industry veteran now applying mobile and web technologies to participatory science at the Natural History Museum in London. For more than 15 years she has worked with entrepreneurs and inventors to launch new businesses to market, has helped corporates to expand their offerings with innovative new products and services, and has run creative collaboration events (such as Hack Days and ThinkCamps) that apply technologies in new fields.

Eglė Marija Ramanauskaitė - one of the organizers of Science Hack Day Vilnius, is a science communicator, educator and researcher at the intersection of life and social sciences. She is Citizen Science Coordinator at the Human Computation Institute. Trained as a molecular biologist and education scientist, her interests include open science, grassroots and DIY science and the hacker movement.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Saulius Gražulis - a professor at the Joint Life Sciences Center, Vilnius University, and a fellow hacker. Saulius studied biophysics in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He then completed his PhD thesis at the Munich technical university in the field of protein X-ray crystallography. He is now actively developing the Crystallography Open Database (COD, http://crystallography.net) and other resources related to it, as well as advocating for the importance of knowledge sharing and open science.

Dr. Sergejus Orlovas from FTMC will be a mentor for participants of M-LAB photonics challenge.

Last but not least, members of Kaunas Makerspace, Technarium and M-LAB will be here to help as well!