Dalek Art Car at Burning Man
A Dalek and a Storm Trooper walk in to a bar …
Science
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!
Introducing Plastics Month
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.
What Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Looks Like
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.
Cannon-Sized Slingshot Fires 80mm Steel Shot
For those of you without metric intuition, 80mm is about pi inches. For those of you without metric intuition who flunked geometry, it’s about 3.14 inches. Which am big. Like, cannonball-sized.
El Pulpo Mecanico: A Flame-shooting Octopus Vehicle
I think you’ll all get a kick out of Duane Flatmo‘s El Pulpo Mecanico, a flame-shooting octopus vehicle from this year’s Burning Man. I have to agree with Cyriaque Lamar from io9, who likens this pyrotechnical cephalopod to a video game boss. Anyone out there who wants to ride this contraption has to line up behind me!
News From The Future: Your Car Is An EEG
Emergency braking assistance has the potential to prevent a large number of car crashes. State-of-the-art systems operate in two stages. Basic safety measures are adopted once external sensors indicate a potential upcoming crash.
Heart-Shaped Wine Cork Trivet, with Gradient Stains
Lately I’ve taken to finding morals in the stuff I post. Last time it was radically limiting your options to inspire more creative thinking. Today, I think, the lesson of this simple-but-striking assemblage is about paying close attention to your starting material. What features does it already have, when you walk up on it, that you can exploit?