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!
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 […]
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 […]
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.
David Dorhout of Ames, IA, is trying to develop a system where a bunch of robots perform all the farming tasks in a field. This is a short video that lays out the new concept of swarm farming and demonstrates the first phase with Prospero, the robot farmer.
Just one of twenty stunning scale models–most of them 1/6 motorcycles–from Spanish crasftman Pere Tarragó of Motoscala Tarragó. Sr. Tarragó takes great work-in-progress shots for his models, and this one is no exception.
This microscope is a project by Sacha De’Angeli of ChemHacker. STM system is a non-optical, high-resolution, microscopy technique that is often used to obtain images of a conductive surface at the atomic scale. A sharp metal tip is placed only a few nano-meters from surface, a current is applied between the two (Tunneling Current). The […]
Imagine waking up and seeing your design for a circuit being used in a product by someone who never contacted you to ask if it was okay. You will not get any payment for their usage of your design, they’ve raised over $31,000 dollars, and they’re selling something you worked really hard on. You have no control over what someone does with something you made. Is this a nightmare? Perhaps for some, but this is actually a dream come true for others. And it’s what this week’s Soapbox is about: Open-source hardware kick-starting Kickstarters!
