How-To: Homemade Castable Refractories
Two easy DIY recipes for high-temperature cement: one starts from ready-made stove repair cement, and another uses only bulk mineral products.
Science
DIY science is the perfect way to use your creative skills and learn something new. With the right supplies, some determination, and a curious mind, you can create amazing experiments that open up a whole world of possibilities. At home-made laboratories or tech workshops, makers from all backgrounds can explore new ideas by finding ways to study their environment in novel ways – allowing them to make breathtaking discoveries!
Announcing Project Remake!
Calling all makers! The Project Remake Contest is in search of a maker who can turn everyday materials into a new & great creation. Five winners will receive a MakerBot Replicator. One Grand Prize winner will receive an expenses-paid trip to World Maker Faire in NYC this September!
“Design For Hack” in Medicine
MacGyvering nurses and Legos are helping to create MEDIKits for better health care.
iPhone Geiger Counter Module
Rick Pannen designed the case for his iPhone-mountable Geiger counter in FreeCAD, milled it out of a solid block of polyoxymethylene (aka “acetal”), and loaded it with a custom-milled PCB and a surplus SI-29BG Russian Geiger-Müller tube from eBay. The circuit itself was designed by BroHogan of DIYGeigerCounter, and it interfaces with the phone through […]
Bones of Blue Plasma
Part of a series of skeletal gas discharge lamps from sculptor Eric Franklin. This one is called Embodiment. Franklin’s work makes a nice compliment to Jessica Lloyd-Jones’ neon organs, which we posted about last week.
April is the Concrete Month…
During April, we are spotlighting one of humanity’s oldest, cheapest, and most commonly-used building materials (Also, surprisingly, one of its most poorly understood.) Speaking generally, concrete is a mixture of three components: aggregate, cement, and water. The aggregate can be gravel, sand, glass, plastic, chunks of old concrete, or pretty much any other solid filler. Concrete’s characteristic transformation…
Math Monday: 12-Card Star Puzzle
Here is a challenging star construction you can make from twelve playing cards.