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!
Sixteen feet long, five feet wide, and four feet tall, this 1/72 replica of the US Navy’s “Big E” represents nineteen years of builder Gabriel Suryani’s 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 haven’t found any indication that Mr. Munroe has actually done this, yet, but there’s no reason the idea shouldn’t 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 […]
Come one, come all, science geeks, food lovers, Arduino hackers. Build a magical box with Arduino-inspired technology that will control the temperature of an appliance you hack, up to 0.1 degrees accuracy. October 15th at the BioCurious hackerspace in Sunnyvale!
As I wrote about a month ago, one of the many unusual phenomena Ben Krasnow has produced in his garage is supercritical CO2. As you may recall, Ben machined a custom acrylic pressure vessel so he could get (and give) a good look at a state of matter that most of us have little experience of. Since then Ben has inadvertently had a chance to observe another extremely unusual effect: the carbonation of solid acrylic.
According to the bio on his website, Jólan van der Wiel admires objects which show experimental discovery and are translated into a functional design. His Gravity Stools demonstrate that perfectly. Using a custom magnetic material and a machine with large magnets to stretch the legs off the seat of the stool, he manufactures a product which is “characterized by the freakish and organic shapes that are so typical of nature itself.”
Bill Secunda’s sculpture “Mantis Dreaming” was inspired by The Verve’s song “Catching The Butterfly.” Of it, he writes: “I imagined a praying mantis might have that dream, his opposite, the butterfly, beautiful, delicate, and always out of reach. He is so infatuated with it, when the butterfly lands on him he stands frozen. His instincts clash with his fascination, all he can do is hope it doesn’t fly away.”
