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!
It’s a simplistic question, possibly even naive. Put it to a chemical engineer or a materials scientist, and she or he will almost certainly not come back with a single answer, but with (at least) two questions: What do you mean by “plastic?” Do thermosetting materials like epoxy count? What about polymers that are reinforced […]
Liam made this cool DIY variable speed stir plate for creating yeast starter for his homebrewed beer. To control the speed of the magnetic stirrer, he used an ATmega328 with the Arduino bootloader connected to a PC case fan. Liam even made use of the LEDs that you can sometimes find on fancy fans to […]
It is an amazing fact that it’s mathematically possible to pass a cube through a hole in another cube of the same size. If you stand a cube up on a corner (with a diagonal vertical) and shine a light down on it, its shadow is a regular hexagon. If you calculate carefully, you’ll find that a square face of the cube can fit inside this hexagon with a bit of room to spare on all sides.
Human beings have been smithing silver for millennia. I was surprised to learn, therefore, that significant advances in silver metallurgy have been made as recently as the 1990s. Sterling silver, by definition, contains 92.5 wt% silver metal and 7.5% other metals, traditionally mostly copper. In 1998, however, Peter Johns of Middlesex University obtained a US […]
Here are parts two and three of Vi Harts’ brilliant and dizzying exploration of the Fibonacci number, plant growth patterns, and the mathematics behind other cool, spiraly things.
Veteran Thingiverse user Tony Buser has printed a model (intended to be an approximation of the fractal Hilbert curve) using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a support material. Once everything is printed and cooled, the PVA is dissolved away in a glass of water, leaving only the polylactic acid (PLA) model. This technique, when perfected, should […]
Two years ago I wrote about what a delight it was to discover the UT-Austin School of Architecture’s Materials Lab when I was on campus there, and it seems appropriate to resurrect the topic in honor of our theme this month. Kevin Kelly just posted a roundup of major materials libraries around the USA over […]
