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!
Mississippian Hillar Bergman is known, first and foremost, as a musician—he plays the fiddle. His YouTube channel, as catinnahat, has several videos describing his wonderful “apocalyptech” potter’s wheel, and demonstrating his skillful use thereof. It’s just an old wheel and tire, mounted on an oak stump with a pair of pipe flanges and a short nipple, and spun up to speed with a tire iron stuck through the holes in the hub.
One of the great things about learning food science is the need to test everything. I say “need” because, in truth, it’s a lot of fun to geek out over the details and try various experiments that I wouldn’t normally try. Take yogurt. Everyone is familiar with it, but how is it made? Where does it come from? (Besides the store…) Making yogurt is incredibly easy, especially once you know some of the food science background. A bunch of different types of “friendly” bacteria chow down on the lactose sugars in milk, creating lactic acid in the process. This process, called fermentation, also changes the structure of the milk, turning it into a gel.
Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion. The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The […]
Christina McFall is obsessed with color, texture, form, and chemical reactions. She approaches the art of cyanotype printing with the mind of a scientist, carefully recording tests and cataloging results. She hand draws and tessellates patterns with her tablet to produce her negatives. Her innovative printing methods harness UV light to create Prussian Blue prints on fabric. She then hacks the dye with various treatments to induce a rainbow of unexpected results. Ultimately she creates beautiful and useful pieces with the prints. Meet Christina McFall and get an up-close view of her intricate textiles at Maker Faire Bay Area, May 21 & 22.
Stained glass can be used to make many mathematical forms. One very beautiful shape is the polar zonohedron. Hans Schepker made this three-foot diameter example from hundreds of pieces of stained glass.
My family and I went to the wonderful NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Open House this weekend. Among the many fascinating sights they shared with the public, this was our favorite. The mobility test platform for the Curiosity rover. With its rocker-bogie passive balance suspension system, this bot does not consider large rocks to be much of an obstacle. At 20″, its wheels are twice the size of those of its predecessors, including the forever-stuck Spirit. Plus, there was a woman from JPL controlling it from an iPhone.
We have covered septuagenarian Palestine, TX, resident Pat Delanyโs DIY multimachine, which is mostly built from recycled auto parts, before. Following on the success of that design, Pat has branched out, researching and promulgating three more simple build-it-yourself tool designs: A treadle-powered electrical generator, a simple compound lever drill press, andโmost interesting to meโa lathe made from cast concrete and aligned with wedges sawn flush after the concrete has set up. Engineering for Change has a good overview of the story and the available online resources. [Thanks, Jake!]
