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 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 […]
DIY methods for electroactive polymer actuators are hard to come by, and none of them are kitchen-counter simple. But compared to the wet chemical methods circulating in the academic research community, the purely mechanical process documented in this video from the Swiss ShapeShift project is relatively accessible. Click here to skip the how-to and go […]
Thingiverse user and retired protein crystallographer(!!!) pmoews created these .STLs of polyhedra (AKA Johnson solids), based off of George Hart’s VRML files of the solids, converting them to .STLs with Fortran(!!!!) (My favorite is the gyrate bidiminished rhombicosidodecahedron, just cuz of the name.)
