OK, so this is undoubtedly the coolest thing I’ve seen this week:

The ElectroPen produces a five-millisecond burst of 2,000 volts, whereas a commercial machine can be tuned to different durations and voltages for various applications. But the ElectroPen is much more accessible: anyone can build their own for a few dollars to crack at least one cell type. “There is definitely a need for low-cost entry to be able to have everyone do those experiments,” du Jeu says. “It’s good to democratize it.” So far high school students have used an ElectroPen to modify Escherichia coli DNA so it produces fluorescent proteins.

More over at Scientific American.

I am both amazed and not a little jealous that gene editing is now on the high-school science curriculum, though…