Battery from Pennies
This simple instructables from seniorhigh shows you how to create a simple battery from a few basic ingredients including pennies, a paper towel, and lemon juice.
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!
Wave Machine From Tape, Toothpicks, and Gummy Bears
What I look for in a project, more than any other single quality, is doing a lot with a little. This “wave machine” demo from the UK’s National STEM Centre, targeted to science teachers for classroom use, is a great example. It’s just duct tape, wooden skewers, and gummy bears, but it creates some really striking, beautiful effects when set in motion. I want to make one in my living room just to play with. Their licensing terms forbid embedding of the video, but it’ll be worth your click to hop on over to STEM and watch it move.
Taking “Digital” Literally: The Binary Hand Dance!
Vi Hart melts my mind again with a totally fun video explanation of binary counting with dancing hands and groovy music. The amount of intelligence, creativity, sense of humor, and the sheer joy of exploring ideas is downright dizzying. She makes it all look effortless. Vi Hart for Secretary of Education! As we’ve pointed out […]
Math Monday: Mathematical Coffee Table
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics If you make a coffee table that express a mathematical idea and place it right in the middle of your living room, that certainly makes a statement to all who visit that math is central in your life. This looks like an ordinary square coffee table, but […]
Time Lapse: Lego Ship in a Bottle
This build from Julia Morley took “a week of planning, three days of building, a large number of expletives, and some interesting use of very long tools.” And you can enjoy the whole process (minus the expletives, which have been replaced with soothing music) in three minutes of 32X time-lapse bliss here. [via The Brothers Brick]
Recycle your E-Waste throughout April in NYC
The Lower East Side Ecology Center in NYC is sponsoring e-waste recycling events throughout all five boroughs for the month of April (aka “Earth Month”). You can find a list of their drop-off sites here, and their FAQ about acceptable items and procedures here. I actually almost never throw away my own e-waste. I still […]
Furniture Made From Close-Packed Tennis Balls
Actually these HEX chairs from designer Hugh Hayden made the rounds back in 2009, but they’re just now coming across my radar via this round-up of tennis ball furniture that recently tripped one of my Google auto-alerts. There are plenty of unusual chairs in the world, and though I like these better than many, I’m more interested in Hayden’s process for joining the tennis balls together.