The BioBus Daily News

Please vote for the BioBus and help other BioBus supporters vote too! You know, co-workers, family, roommates, insect larvae, microorganisms, etc. Tuesday at midnight is the deadline, and we’re hanging by a hair to second place in the semi-final round for the $10,000. I don’t want to lose it now that we’ve done so well all week! Thank you for everyone who has already voted and helped spread the word – the final round will be the last week of July (if we make it) and then we will need you to vote one last time.

In other news, we had a great time at Solar One’s CitySol on Sunday. We had many visitors, mostly young ones, and the New York Microscopical Society (NYMS) also joined us with some of their microscopes. We even managed to fish some zooplankton out of the East River – who knew anything was still alive in there!! Though nothing compared with the turtle that Colin from Solar One dredged up! I forgot my camera on the BioBus today, but I will post photos soon.

Dear BioBus Supporters:

I’ll keep this to the point – help us win ten thousand dollars by voting for the BioBus at ideablob.com.

After you vote, please spread the word and convince your friends, family, and co-workers to vote as well. If we have the most votes by the end of the week, we enter into the finals. Registering to vote takes under five minutes (especially if you skip the optional part). Easy links for sharing via Facebook and email are on the ideablob.com page itself.

Also, join the BioBus this Sunday from 11AM-6PM when we will perform public demonstrations for children at the CitySol festival at Solar One. Solar One is located on 23rd street on the East River.

Thank you for your support. – Ben

While it may still be raining like it’s April, it’s in fact late June, marking the end of the BioBus’ first full school year. What a ride it has been! The BioBus spent the Fall touring the mid-west and getting a bright new paint job in Jersey City. Then we made our first visit to the Bronx in December, which went so well that we ended up visiting 20 high schools and middle schools throughout the Bronx, in addition to schools throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Over 10,000 students visited the BioBus for our introductory Explorers course, and hundreds more received our in-depth Discoverers training. Our work was rewarded by astoundingly good feedback from students, teachers, parents, and the popular press, and we are already planning return trips to many of theses schools for next year, along with new schools.

I am particularly proud of this article in the Bronx Times.

Thanks to everyone who contributed time and money to make this year such a resounding success. In particular, thanks to our ‘Visiting Scientists’ from Columbia, Rockefeller, Albert Einstein, and NYU who brought their expertise to the BioBus throughout the year. I would also like to single out Olympus amongst our corporate donors for their donation of a second microscope.

Stay tuned for upcoming summer events, including our Family Fishing Festival at Harlem Meer in Central Park on June 27 and CitySol at SolarOne on July 12. In the meantime, tweet us on twitter, enjoy our photo gallery, and join our mailing list or our Facebook group.

A new article published today in PLOS One from Columbia University and Cell Motion Labs (the non-profit that runs the BioBus) gives new insights into how cells move. And, even if you’re not into the gory details of what a cell is doing when it spreads out like a pancake on the microscope, you might still be interested in just playing through the movies, like this one:

All PLOS journals are free, and you can even comment on and rate articles! So please support this work and open-science by going to the article, browsing around, and giving your two-cents.

Gaylen has done a bang-up job on the wheel well cover. Instead of making two steps as in Ray’s original design, we made just one on the bottom and left the curve of the wheel-well alone, which I think looks really nice and is perfectly functional. The wood was all reused – it came partly from the organ in grace church and partly from Gary’s original wheel well cover that I still had in storage. The structure holds an uncanny resemblance to a gigantic plant cell, and it would  be fun to paint it like that! Next project up: better cabinets for the wet-lab.

The tour was a real success, but of course it is very nice to be back home in New York! The bus is back at Grace Church in Jersey city, in fact, just across the river from Manhattan. We are finishing up the painting here and also making some improvements to the interior based on our experience on the tour. In addition, this Sunday we will have BioBus Sunday as a way to give thanks to the church for its generosity in letting the bus park in the driveway while we paint it.

Sketch of Wheel Well Stand

Tomorrow, my friend Gaylen will help me add a step/seat on the left-front wheel well, based on the design by Ray Naula (at right). This will add to the useable space in the front of the bus. The wood is coming from the old organ in Grace Church that Donald is currently taking apart – it was made of beautiful hard-wood and will make a very sturdy, and handsome, addition to the lab.

One of the things I have found quite gratifying while working on the bus has been our ability to get many of the materials we need second-hand or sometimes even out of the garbage. It is incredible how much stuff we throw away that is perfectly good and useable, if you can just find the person who needs it! It is true that you can usually furnish your apartment just by spending a few days looking at the trash piles on the street. I’d like to take this opportunity to promote one of my favorite, slightly more organized, recycling resources, called Freecycle. On the NYC list, there are about 100 items people are giving away for free on the list every day – it is an amazing resource whether you are running a shoe-string non-profit or trying to help save the planet by reusing things that would end up in a land-fill, instead of buying them new.

Francisco

Francisco came by last night and did an amazing job cleaning the microscope and wet lab. Francisco is gifted in many things – he not just cleaned the bus, he started teaching me how I could keep the bus clean myself more easily! Typically the bus gets cluttered with tools and parts until I have students coming on board and I clean it just for these occasions. But I need to develop a system for storing things and keeping things neat so that the bus is always ready for action. Francisco also came up with a very neat idea about how to use the space in the computer lab at the back of the bus that is atop the vegetable oil tanks. This is a large platform, about 7 foot long and 6 feet wide, with about 5 feet between the platform and the ceiling. Francisco’s idea is to put cushions along the walls around the sides of the platform and add a low table in the center of the platform. Students would sit cross-legged or with their legs under the table. The number of students that could sit would range between 4 and 10, depend on whether they were big high schoolers or smaller kindergardeners. I think it is a really nice way to utilize the space, and I will also try to make the table adjustable height so that it can accommodate different sized people, as well as drop down all the way when the platform needs to be used as a bed.

It is getting cold again, and the wood stove is heating everything up nicely. I have gotten good at making smoke-free fires, and the stove is big enough to really heat up the entire bus. There are still places that need to be better insulated, but otherwise I am happy. I am still considering replacing the wood-stove with much more convenient and space-saving propane heat, but there are also good reasons not to do it. First, wood-heat is very cheap! Second, it is carbon-neutral. Third, it makes the bus have a really nice atmosphere. On the other hand, propane can be turned on and off instantly, and replacing the wood-stove with a propane heater would make enough room for another microscope station.