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!
OK, almost no moving parts. Practically no moving parts.
I never expected to be able to appreciate my cheap Wal-Mart coffee maker for anything other than its price tag Once again, Bill Hammack has managed to amaze me with some little marvel of engineering design I take for granted nearly every day. Thanks, Bill, as always. Keep ’em coming!
A month ago, I blogged about Ron Doerfler’s beautiful Age of Graphical Computing calendar for 2010, lamenting the fact that it’d only appeared on my radar at the end of the year. Well, I’ve been keeping an eye peeled, and Ron just released his 2011 calendar. It’s not about graphical computing, but about what is perhaps an equally interesting mathematical curiosity: Techniques for doing fast mental math. And it looks to be just as beautiful.
When I was in graduate school, I took a seminar class from a chemist whose work in developing self-healing polymers was widely admired. I had seen these self-healing cutting mats in the MicroMark catalog, and always wondered what they were made of. So I asked him, in class. He looked at me like I’d grown a second head: “You mean to tell me you’ve seen self-healing polymers on the market? In a consumer product?” Later I brought him the catalog, and showed him the listing. He was stumped, and more than a bit dubious.
Polyhedra lovers are fond of certain compound shapes, such as this symmetric arrangement of five concentric regular tetrahedra. If you like to make things in wood, it’s a natural challenge to cut some plywood, bevel the edges, and screw or glue together a giant geometric model. Here is Dale Seymour with his compound of five […]
Today marks the first anniversary of the birth of Polish-born, Franco-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot since his death on October 14. Mandelbrot worked in a variety of mathematical disciplines, but is best known as the “Father of Fractal Geometry.” He was well eulogized by the New York Times, and, more personally, by Rudy Rucker. Today he would’ve been 86.
We featured the meticulously-organized workshop that Milwaukeean Cindy Smith shares with her husband, Craig, back in March. Craig saw our recent human-powered lifting devices post and wrote in to share with us the custom snow-plow-tricycle he built for removing light snowfall from his driveway:
Autodesk has been giving away Inventor of the Month awards. The October award was given to a group of Stanford grad students. They designed the “Bloom laptop,” which is designed to be completely field-stripped in a couple of minutes for ease of recycling, without the use of tools. One side benefit of their design is […]
