Assemble your own solar panel
This DIY video will run through the basics of chaining together polycrystalline cells and leaves the details like enclosure and such to the user.
Month: February 2010
Glenn Seaborg’s old mailing address
The occasion of Dmitri Mendeleev’s birthday seemed like a good opportunity to recognize another great hero of the periodic table and to relate one of my favorite anecdotes about him: Glenn T. Seaborg (Wikipedia), who, among his various stellar achievements, won the 1951 Nobel Prize for “discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements.” By the time of his death in 1999, Seaborg had participated in the discovery and isolation of ten superheavy elements. Shortly after the official 1997 recognition of the name seaborgium for element 106, writer Jeffrey Winters, writing in the January 1998 issue of Discover Magazine, made the following observation:
Maker Birthdays: Dmitri Mendeleev
Born on this date in 1834 in the small village of Aremzyani, in what was then considered Siberia, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev would go on, in 1869, to produce the first periodic table of the chemical elements. Mendeleev used the periodicity he’d observed in the properties of then-known elements to accurately predict many of the properties of germanium, gallium, and scandium, which had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev died in St. Petersburg in 1907, at the age of 72. Element number 101 is named mendelevium in his honor.
Brilliant red dye made from insects
This article just drew my attention to the interesting story behind carmine, which is a pigment precipitated from carminic acid (shown above) extracted from the bodies of Dactylopius coccus, the so-called “cochineal” insect, of which the acid comprises up to 24% of dry body weight. The cochineal is a parasite of cacti of the genus opuntia, from which it has been harvested in South America since pre-Columbian times. It is carmine that made the “red” of the famous British “red coats,” and today carmine is still produced in great quantity for use in fabric, cosmetics, and as a natural food coloring. [via Neatorama]
Warship camouflaged as tropical island
A commenter on my recent dazzle camouflage post alerted us to the fascinating story of the HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen which, in 1942, escaped destruction by the Japanese fleet because the crew moored her among other small islands and covered her in a thick layer of tree branches, thereby disguising her as a small island. [Thanks, rekinom!]
Lego Solar Dynamics Observatory kit
One of the great things about being here at Kennedy Space Center for the launch of STS-130 is getting to meet some of the other space enthusiasts who are also here for the launch. The Space Tweep Society has proven to be a great resource for connecting with fellow space geeks (specifically those active on […]
Bowling lane coffee table
William Stranger specializes in building furniture out of repurposed wood. I especially liked the massive coffee table whose top is a four-inch-thick slab of bowling lane. It’s part of a exhibit(?) called Second Growth: A second growth forest is one that has re-grown after it has been heavily logged or clear-cut. The installation of reclaimed […]