BROADCASTS.com

b'

In this episode we chatted to Kristin Ellis, the Scientific Development Lead at OpenTrons, about all things science. OpenTrons is a company that builds affordable open-source lab robots, that remove the need to perform tedious manual\\xa0pipetting tasks, to free up valuable time for researchers.\\xa0

We touched on the importance of good science communication and the unfair stigma that often impacts researchers that are keen to involve and talk to\\xa0the public, and the true value of encouraging that "...and then it just clicked" moment with people previously disengaged with science.\\xa0

We also spoke about the innovative ways tinkerers have adapted their open-source robots, the value of putting automation into the hands of the many, and the attitude shift required in science to promote prototyping and hacking. We were keen to see how OpenTrons has been received by academics looking to streamline their research and\\xa0were fascinated by their passage through Haxclr8tr (a hardware startup accelerator, now called HAX).\\xa0Their relationship to\\xa0Shenzhen is also pretty amazing\\xa0- described as the silicon valley for hardware, the labyrinthine market in Shenzhen allows hardware hackers to rapidly test out ideas, a concept essentially intractable even with the electronic hardware superstores elsewhere.