How-To: Replace street car tracks
MAKE subscriber Ken Murphy shared this time-lapse video that he took of the MUNI streetcar construction in front of his house.
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!
BBC takes initiative in linking to primary scientific sources
The Guardian is reporting on a recent change to the BBC’s editorial policy that calls for links to primary research from their online science articles. Without intending an I-told-you-so, this is something I’ve been doing since I started blogging, and I am thrilled that mainstream journalists are starting to do the same thing. There are tons of reasons why it’s a great idea, but these are my big three:
Hydropower from a public fountain
An artist who builds machines, I’m constantly dealing with the issue of how I can power my devices. Usually, I make it the old school way, simply using sockets in the wall of the gallery. But this project in Belgium happened in a public park, where no electricity was available. As there was a huge fountain, Jari and me decided to tap its hydropower and to generate electricity with it, as we found this far more elegant than using batteries. Furthermore, it was fitting conceptually to the devices that we were powering with the large fountain: It was some tiny private fountains that we rented out to visitors of the park.I think the concept of recycling energy which is available in the city anyway has a lot of potential.
CollectSPACE: Think Craigslist for space nerds
This could appear on one of those “What is this gadget?” posts. (It’s an RCS — Reentry Control System thruster from the Gemini era.)
StreetBeest takes over Somerville!
Over the past few weeks and months, the community of makers centered around Sprout in Somerville MA has been quietly hatching a plan to build a Theo Jansen inspired walker to walk in the Honk Festival parade. Dubbed the StreetBeest, after the Jansen’s StrandBeest project, it is constructed of strapping, PVC and a few custom fabricated drive train parts. For more information on the build and design, check out this interview with Shaunalyn Duffy of The Sprouts.
Cameraphone spectrometer for high school chem labs
“In High School Chem Labs, Every Cameraphone Can Be a Spectrometer” on Wired.com. [via adafruit] University of Illinois chemistry professor Alexander Scheeline has developed software that turns a camera phone, an LED, and a few other cheap tools into a spectrometer. Armed with these, he thinks we can bring high-end analytic tools to high school […]
Told You So: Whale snot takes Ig Nobel
As you may have heard, last week in Stockholm a bunch of lucky stiffs talented, hard-working scientists (and one fiction author) got to meet the King of Norway. Science-y highlights include the Physics prize, which went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for some fancy tricks with carbon (specifically graphene); the Medicine prize, to Robert G. Edwards for inventing the test tube baby; and the Chemistry prize, to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki for, ah, some other fancy tricks with carbon (plus palladium). That’s all well and good.
