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!
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.
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.
I think youโll all get a kick out of Duane Flatmoโs El Pulpo Mecanico, a flame-shooting octopus vehicle from this yearโs 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!
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.
Lately Iโve 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?
ITP students Michell Cardona and Nelson Ramon Ramirez created several different oscillating wind generators before settling on something that works the best. Similar to the Humdinger in function, their Linear Wind Electricity Catcher works by fluttering a magnet in close proximity to a transformer, which translates kinetic energy to electrical energy after being rectified.
In September of last year, Matt Mets blogged about Visual 6502, an in-browser simulation of the landmark MOS 6502 microprocessor, produced by San Francisco hacker Greg James and Montreal brothers Barry and Bryan Silverman. Recently, the July/August issue of the American Institute for Archaeologyโs “Archaeology” featured an interesting article about the story behind Visual 6502…
