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!
Jack Heathcote is now the proud owner of what, at 4,800 gallons, is reportedly the largest home aquarium in the United Kingdom. What’s more, he designed and built it himself. That’s him diving in the tank (and looking rather strikingly, IMHO, like Abraham Sapien from Hellboy), which is apparently the easiest way to clean the interior. Nice details and pictures over at The Daily Mail. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]
Check out the scanning electron microscope Ben Krasnow made. It’s a fine example of some of the higher-end DIY lab equipment starting to show up in garages and hackerspaces around the world.
Akiba from Tokyo Hackerspace has been understandably interested in geiger counters of late. The day after the nuclear problems started occurring at the plant, geiger counters started popping up on Ustream. After that, Pachube set up special accounts for radiation data feeds in Japan (thank you Pachube). Unfortunately, geiger counters were sold out everywhere. The […]
This Instructable from Jared Foster doesn’t just show you how to make his cool persistence-of-vision business card. It takes you through the construction of a circulating etch tank, the modification of a laminating machine to make a stencil applicator, the assembly of a controller to turn a toaster into a reflow oven, and the cobbling-together of a vacuum pickup tool for SMT components. And then you get some practice using all that cool stuff making a POV business card. It even comes with obligatory American Psycho allusions.
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Pipe cleaners are easily woven into flat lattice patterns, but spherical weaves are more challenging. Here is a good exercise in spherical thinking that is much harder than it looks. The thirty pipe cleaners each have the same shape and the same relationship to their neighbors. The […]
In the wake of the Japanese disaster trifecta, I contacted our pal Francesco Fondi, of Wired Italy’s Otaku News and Hobby Media, to make sure he was OK (in Tokyo). He’s fine. He also sent us a link to a piece he’d done on Wired.it about DIY Geiger counters. It looked interesting, so I asked […]
The color is reportedly permanent. Published as Intrinsically Colored and Luminescent Silk by Dr. Natalia Tansil and co-workers at Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering. [via CRAFT]
