Upcoming mappings, project updates and a wide range of research notes-- from using a balloon string winder with a cordless drill to building a "corset-chiton" for the balloon used in the air column monitor-- here's the weekly updates from the Public Lab community!

1. On Monday, May 7th, there will be mapping at Saugus Landfill (Boston-area), as a follow-up to a mapping trip in October 2011. For more information about the mapping, read on here.

2. Currently the balloon mapping kits are sold out! They are being restocked this week and back orders will be shipped out by early next week. Yesterday, Public Lab announced a new price on the kits.

3. On Tuesday, the Public Lab community joined the crowd at the May Day protests in New York City to try out live streaming of the event. The use of aerial mapping at the protest was covered yesterday by The Verge.

4. Toxics Action Center (TAC), a New England non-profit that has been organizing with communities to clean-up pollution for the last twenty-five years, submitted a two-year grant for a collaborative project with Public Lab in Vermont. The project with train TAC staffers and Vermont communities how to use Public Lab tools and work with Public Lab data to achieve results for their communities in pollution prevention and clean-up.

5. Last week, Public Lab staff member, Adam Griffith, presented a poster on data lifecycles in Vienna at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union.

6. The PBS MediaShift IdeaLab blog published a post written by Stewart Long, "How we got here: the road to Public Lab's map project".

7. A few randomly selected research note highlights from the week: Powered string winder for balloons (posted by natevw) Endurance of visible/NIR camera and timer (posted by cfastie) Sketches for "corset-chiton" idea for pufferfish mod (posted by eustatic) No output signal on IR kit timer (posted by cfastie) Spectrometer alignment ideas (posted by warren) Gowanus Canal salt lot kit mapping (posted by Eymund Diegel) Save the Bay, Providence, RI map (from map archive)