I just ran across an interesting open community, called Public Lab.
“The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) is a community – supported by a 501(c)3 non-profit – which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible Do-It-Yourself techniques, Public Lab creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.”
That sounds like something worth investigating, and here is an example of what’s on their website:
“I’ve been reading and annotating a collection of formal research papers on fluorescence spectroscopy – an in particular, laser induced fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopy, in order to connect our work with the Oil Testing Kit with existing literature, as well as to improve and support our techniques.”
“Continued literature review for the Oil Testing Kit”
http://publiclab.org/notes/show/11053
“The Oil Testing Kit is an open source Do-It-Yourself kit which attempts to make it possible to identify oil pollution by type.”
http://publiclab.org/wiki/oil-testing-kit
The page tells how to create one of these kits; this sounds like an interesting project we could do.