Backyard Fountain Tutorial
Here’s a great step-by-step from Hip House Girl on making a fountain for your backyard. A decorative pot and the sound of running water can make your garden even more feng shui and magical.
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!
Build Your Own Jellyfish Habitat
Though MAKE Volume 27, which hits newsstands on July 26, is the Robots issue, like all issues of MAKE, it features a wide variety of projects. One of the major projects in Volume 27 is Alex Andon’s Jellyfish Tank. Jellyfish are hypnotic, with their translucent bodies, sweeping tentacles, and fluid motion, but they require custom […]
Making EL Wire Change Color
It’s not a dramatic color shift, but it turns out you can control the hue of EL wire over a narrow range by varying the frequency of the resonating driver circuit. dcroy (upper video) did it back in February using a 555, and Paul Stoffregen (lower video) unknowingly repeated the work recently, having noticed that a single fixed-frequency driver produced slightly different colors in two different lengths of wire.
Milwaukee Makers on Parade
Milwaukee Makerspace brought electric vehicles and floats to Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s South Shore Frolics parade. Milwaukee Makerspace member David Overbeck has loved Milwaukee’s South Shore Frolics Parade since he was a kid, and with the help of other makers, he led a group build of a 9 foot tall “Old Milwaukee Makerspace” beer can to appear […]
Working Iron Man Style Palm Laser Weapon
Yes, OK, I know that the weapons in Iron Man’s palms are technically *repulsor* beams, which, at least as I understand them, are a kind of wholly sci-fictional counterpart to the equally sci-fictional “tractor” beam. But this terrifying device from German laserhacker Patrick Priebe, who previously has produced a handheld Nd-YAG pulse laser that will punch holes in, is “working” in the sense that it is a dangerous, if not deadly, directed energy weapon that you can wear on your palm and use to work great evil…
How-To: Make a PopsicleBot 6-Legged Walker
Here’s a fun project to get a walking robot up and running as soon as possible.
A Most Notable Nobel
Happy International Year of Chemistry! And this is also the 100th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Marie Curie. To commemorate the occasion, the magazine, Chemical and Engineering News asked several chemists to contribute essays about the achievements of chemistry. Well worth reading is Naomi Pasachoffโs essay on Curie. Truly, has there ever been a scientist as courageous as Madam Curie?
