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!

Math Monday: The Squared Square

Math Monday: The Squared Square

If you are a cabinet maker, geometry is essential to all the lengths and angles that you calculate. The cabinet shown here goes further and presents the solution to a rather difficult dissection problem. This is the simplest perfect squared square. The entire area is a square and it is divided into squares of distinct integer sizes.

Harvard’s  Swarm-bot Design

Harvard’s $14 Swarm-bot Design

If you’re interested in building real-world robot swarms, the unit cost is everything. Reportedly, most commercial swarm bots cost $100 or more, sothis innovative design from Michael Rubenstein, Nicholas Hoff, and Radhika Nagpal of the Harvard’s Self Organizing Systems Research Group represents an order-of-magnitude savings over existing platforms. They call it “Kilobot,” and besides low cost, it is designed for rapid assembly (<5 min/unit) and group charging using plates that engage the top and bottom of the entire swarm at once.

Lego Orrery

MAKE blog regular Guy Himber built this orrery for an online Lego competitionโ€ฆ so sweet. I always wanted to build something like this ever since I saw a giant fantasy orrery in the movie Dark Crystal. As it has been on my builder’s ‘wish list’ for a while I figured the Iron Builder Competition was […]

Garden Pool in MAKE Volume 26

Garden Pool in MAKE Volume 26

Dennis and Danielle McClung bought a foreclosed home in Mesa, Ariz. Rather than filling the empty pool in the backyard with water or concrete, they turned it into a greenhouse which they call Garden Pool. Read all about this and many other inspiring human creations in the handsome and highly collectible MAKE magazine! This particular […]

The Alkali Metal Series, Reacting with Air and Water

If I understand the annotations on this, YouTuber ironnicaโ€™s only posted video, correctly, the footage was produced by a New Jersey educational media company in 1991, and the delightfully British narration more recently by somebody associated with the UKโ€™s Open University. In any case, it is a perfectly concise, interesting, and entertaining demonstration of the increasing reactivities of the group I metals lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium.