Biology

Printable Pest Control

Printable Pest Control

Kiwi programmer and farmer John Hart of Lifeboat Farm has been experimenting with using his RepRap to produce mechanical pest control devices so he can leave off the chemical pesticides. Shown above, fused-filament butterfly decoys, spotted with a marker and mounted on stalks of plastic filament in the garden: The stalks are quite flexible so […]

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3D-Printed Shells for Hermit Crabs

If you can endure the relentless puns, the tag aggregator page for MakerBot’s Project Shellter is a fun read. There are cool pics of the denizens of MakerBot’s official “crabitat” sporting their fused-filament homes (such as “Paris Shelton,” above, in a lovely little daffodil yellow number) as well as oddly touching night-time videos of each […]

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Bringing Xiphactinus Back to Life

Bringing Xiphactinus Back to Life

While developing the second phase of their Cretaceous Sea Exhibition, The Hastings Museum in Hastings, NE commissioned a life-size model of a Xiphactinus from Gary Staab, a paleo artist based in Kearney, MO. The Xiphactinus was a large predator fish that lived in the Western Interior Sea during the late Cretaceous Period and skeletal remains […]

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Life Size Junk Mammoth

Life Size Junk Mammoth

Junk artist extraordinaire Jud Turner is an old favorite here at MAKE. He’s just moved into a bigger studio and completed his largest piece, ever—a life-size Columbian Mammoth skeleton made from “95% recycled materilas, mostly old farm equipment and agricultural tools.” He’s also posted some cool work-in-progress shots here. [Thanks, Jud!]

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Kim Holleman’s Micro-Environments are Very Much Alive

Kim Holleman’s Micro-Environments are Very Much Alive

Combining issues around utopia, environmentalism, and contamination, Kim Holleman will be exhibiting some of her micro-environments at Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn, opening this Friday. Working with vintage scientific beakers and bottles, Kim’s “faux-scientific archive” presents us with miniaturized landscapes that comment on mankind’s chemical footprint, but show that truly defiant biology will grow almost […]

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LCD Projector Hacked Into a Medical Imaging System

LCD Projector Hacked Into a Medical Imaging System

I love stories like this, about how people are making use of off-the-shelf technologies to mimic the effects of more sophisticated and expensive scientific equipment. Yay DIY! The slow march of optical spectroscopies toward the clinic has been helped along by technologies borrowed from communications electronics. Those technologies are allowing optics researchers to build things […]

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Grown-Crystal and EL-Wire DNA Lamp

Instructables user LucidMovement built this great lamp out of electro-luminescent wire covered in crystals. So, of course, all of you reading this have thought to yourself at one time or another “I would absolutely love to grow some crystals on el-wire and then encase it in silicone and acrylic.” No? Oh, well maybe it was […]

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