Science in Your Cereal Bowl!
These famous cereal premiums were tiny — but packed with mighty scientific principles!
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!
Scratchbuilt: 1/87 Mack FCSW Water Truck
1/87 is essentially HO scale, which is said to be the most popular scale for model rail stock in the world. For cars and even large trucks, as you can see, it’s pretty dang small. Which is what makes the level of detail achieved by renowned truck modeler Joe Enriquez on this, and his many other models in the same scale, so remarkable.
How-To: Anodize Aluminum Without Strong Acid
If you’ve ever wanted to experiment with aluminum anodizing but were put off by the conventional requirement for concentrated sulfuric acid, you will be very interested to read of Ken’s successes with an alternate process using the acidic sodium salt of sulfuric acid. This salt, sodium bisulfate (NaHSO4) is much safer to transport, handle, and dispose of than the strong acid, and appears to give anodizing results that are just as good or better.
Colorful Beaded Skulls
Our own Andrew Salomone spotted this beautiful skull, one of eight in a limited edition called “Our Exquisite Corpse” sold through a trendy London boutique. Seed-beaded art objects like this are commonly identified with the Native American Huichol people of western central Mexico, though the style is dubiously “traditional.”
Scratchbuilt: The “Swift” from “Space 1999”
Alex Dumas of Sci-High Models took Editor’s Choice in Starship Modeler’s 2010 Just Glue It contest with this 1/87 scale replica of the Swift, a spacecraft from the late-70s British TV series Space: 1999. Do not miss his wonderful work-in-progress shots, one of which I’ve included, below, to show off the remarkable patience and skill […]
PLA Seed Bomb
Tony Buser’s F-Bomb packs soil and flower seeds into a bomb-shaped and biodegradable PLA shell. Sure, there are cheaper and more efficient ways to do this… but… pfft… The idea is to stuff it with some compost and seeds and then throw it somewhere that you think could use some color, but you either can’t […]
How-To: Get a Liquid Lens Module to Play With
A liquid lens is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The really cool thing about them is that, though they have no moving parts (unless you count the liquid itself), they can achieve a pretty wide range of dynamically-variable focal lengths over a relatively short optical path. When I first read about them, the killer app was supposedly going to be phone cameras.
