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!
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 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.
