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!
A few weeks ago this column showed an assortment of small geometric structures made from beads by Horibe Kazunori. Well, anything which is cool at hold-in-your-hand size becomes extra cool when scaled up to gigantic size.
We’ll be making DIY ecosystems — fully self-supporting and sealed from the outside world, with some plants, animals, and a few drops of pond scum, in a Mason jar. These same biospheres sell in airline catalogs for hundreds of dollars.
Laurent Laveder is a landscape astrophotographer. No, really. That’s his job! OK, he’s also an astronomy journalist, if that makes you feel any better. But it’s his amazing astrophotography, especially his series called Moon Games, that really inspires awe… and lots of FB/G+ reposting.
When I posted the awesome giant Dalek art car yesterday, I mentioned that I hadn’t been able to find much information on the project or its creator. Thankfully I heard from Cory who, along with his wife, brought this Dr. Who dream to life. I loved hearing about their process for the project, and seeing their great build pictures and am glad we can now share them with you. Enjoy!
A Dalek and a Storm Trooper walk in to a bar …
The very word means capable of being shaped, molded. Plastic is a cheap, durable, plentiful, extremely adaptable, and variable material that can be put to seemingly endless uses, from furnishings, building materials, and machine parts, to tools, weapons, vehicles, to now just about anything that can be extruded from a 3D printing head. The downside of its cheapness and ubiquity (not to mention the polluting nature of its manufacture) is that it leads to a profusion of waste material.
At extremes of temperature and pressure above a substance’s so-called “critical point,” the distinction between liquid and gas phases of that substance stops being meaningful, and the substance enters a homogeneous “supercritical” phase. For many substances, supercritical temperatures and pressures are difficult to achieve, and that’s doubly true if you’re hoping to achieve them under conditions that still allow for visual observation.
