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!
Make: Online staple Craig Smith of the Firefly Workshop in South Milwaukee, WI, wrote in with some great sentiments about living the maker lifestyle. To me, MAKE: has not been a neat project here or there in my spare hobby time. It has been a way to solve everyday needs. Today in fact, I used […]
Alex Schlegel made these two neuroscience-themed self portraits based on a model of his actual brain cast in bronze. Alex writes: This self-portrait is a life-sized, anatomically-correct bronze cast of my cerebral cortex. Embedded on the surface of the cortex is a cluster of 60 flickering, yellow LEDs resembling the statistical parametric maps used in […]
Here in one of the entries to our Green Project Contest. Maker Marque Cornblatt shows you how he converted a gasoline motorcycle into an electric cycle. Have you checked out our Green Projects Contest yet? Some clever, fun projects and ideas have been submitted. Vote for the ones you like. Put up your own projects, […]
There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times titled Home Labs on the Rise for the Fun of Science about people equipping their homes with equipment like USB microscopes and computerized telescopes. Make: Online’s citizen scientist guest authors Tito Jankowski and Eri Gentry are quoted talking about the OpenPCR project, and I briefly mention […]
Dollar Store Crafts has lots of really great, reader-submitted holiday decorating ideas, including these two that really piqued my interest. Mitten Garland I’m heading over to the local thrift store to look for old wool sweaters and scarves to make this! We’re working on a Dr. Seuss-inspired tree this year, and I think maybe a […]
Hoffman clamps are extraordinarily handy bits of lab kit. The screw is turned to compress a piece of flexible tubing between two bars, and may be thus be used to completely stop or simply to regulate flow of gas or liquid through such tubing. The screwing action of the Hoffman clamp allows adjustment of the rate of flow infinitesimally from full open to full stop. In amateur apparatus, a Hoffman clamp can often take the place of a glass or teflon stopcock, which is a much more sophisticated and expensive bit of apparatus. And they’re cheap!
In Jeri Ellsworth latest nerd lab vid notes, she explains how to make an IR detection device by “quenching” copper-doped zinc sulfide (ZnS:CU) glow powder and how to measure temperature with thermally-quenched phosphors. Practical uses of Quenching in Phosphors
