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!
There are many ways to calculate an approximation to pi, but rarely is math as delicious as in this idea from Davidson College professor Tim Chartier. Make a quarter circle in a square of graph paper and place chocolate chips on the squares that lie inside the circle. If you now count the chips and compute four times the number of chocolate chips divided by the total number of squares, that will be approximately pi.
Though described as an “electronic instrument” and an “orchestraโฆcomposed of levitating balls whose physical height determines their volume,” London design group Poietic Studioโs “Floating Orchestra,” cool as it is, cannot possibly be producing the big, bold, brassy sounds of The Benny Goodman Orchestra that accompany their embedded video, above. Which naturally leads me to wonder what it really sounds like.
The editors of Makeshift noticed that production, more than at any point in the last century, is occurring at the grassroots. In different cultures it goes by different names: DIY in the US, jugaad in India, jua kali in East Africa, and gambiarra in Brazil. Makeshift seeks to unify these cultures into a global identity.
Dawei Lin studies DNA at UC, but also started building Lego models of DNA as a teaching tool for his young daughter. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 he displays the various DNA models he’s made, while explaining that the act of construction can often be the most valuable learning tool for many different topics.
Sixteen feet long, five feet wide, and four feet tall, this 1/72 replica of the US Navyโs “Big E” represents nineteen years of builder Gabriel Suryaniโs hobby, and has been called “something that is close to the limits a single modeler can achieve.”
Many of you will probably have seen this one from late August, already. I havenโt found any indication that Mr. Munroe has actually done this, yet, but thereโs no reason the idea shouldnโt work, in principle. To do so requires a viewer with an individually addressable video display for each eye, but these are not too hard to come by. And large-parallax static stereograms taken using widely-separated synchronized cameras are well known.
If car users knew how fast cyclists were moving, would they be more willing to share the road? That’s the question posed by Mykle Hansen in the intro to his Speed Vest project from MAKE Volume 19. Bicyclists receive a lot of honk-based grief from car drivers who perceive them as slow and in the […]
