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!
“I ignited four pounds of thermite made with aluminum / iron (III) oxide in a flower pot. The thermite reaction quickly formed liquid iron which dripped down out of the pot, and into a ceramic pan. I put a beef kebab directly onto the liquid iron, which cooked the food in under a minute. It was delicious!”
I was taken by your Tamiya nomination for The Makeys, as I had a ball making something quite different from one of their kits. I was driving to a hobby shop (no surprise there!) at lunch one day. When I pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall, I saw what looked to be an electric bug making large and speedy circles on the asphalt.
Besides making interesting intellectual problems, zipper unfoldings have many cool potential crafty applications as purses, bags, pillows, etc. With sufficiently rigid or reinforced fabric and the right shape, one might even make a zip-up chair, stool, table, or other furniture this way.
While I might be slightly squeamish about staying in Austrian Andreas Strauss’s open-to-the-public, semi-outdoor, pay-what-you-want dasparkhotel, I love the idea of using drain pipe sections as small outdoor structures.
This project was inspired by “Cooking for Geeks” author Jeff Potter’s quick DIY sous-vide hack. My plan, initially, was to just hack the controller into an enclosure with an A/C outlet, the idea being that you could just plug any heater you wanted into the outlet. Looking around for cheap temperature controllers, however, I happened across the STC-1000 on eBay for $25. It’s not PID, but it has proven to be plenty accurate enough for almost any practical purpose. And since the STC-1000 has both heating and cooling functions built-in, the logical next step seemed to be to split a single A/C outlet so that you could plug a heater or a cooler (or both) into it and use it for all kinds of stuff.
Reportedly, the equation above plots as the figure below, which is…familiar from somewhere. Can’t quite put my finger on it.
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Here is a wide variety of mathematical beadwork structures by Horibe Kazunori. Looking closely at one example, you can see how the surface curvature depends on the structure. Generally, six-sided cycles correspond to an infinite tessellation of hexagons, which makes a flat plane or can be rolled […]
