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!
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Each year I visit the annual Origami convention in New York City, and this year, as always, I was impressed by the wide range of works on display. The mathematical examples get more sophisticated each year. Here are just four examples to illustrate a range of folding […]
I’m very happy to announce the availability of Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks in the Maker Shed. I met Jeff while he was making ice cream with liquid nitrogen at a party sometime last year. I don’t think I’ve been more excited about a cookbook in my life. If you were ever curious about what you eat beyond the ingredients and recipe, then Cooking for Geeks is for you.
Honestly, they had me at “glowing balloons.” I’ve got a box on a shelf in my closet that houses my past, failed, experiments to make floating, glowing party balloons. The group at Carnegie Mellon that produced this Instructable makes it work by using weather balloons which are bigger and can provide more buoyancy. That the LEDs they use are tri-color versions that change to reflect the ambient air quality is just icing on the cake. [via Boing Boing]
Ladyada writes – This is actually not any sort of product or public project (!) – its something we designed to help me evaluate solar panels and how they act when charging batteries. Normally this requires a lot of multimeters and its a bit of a pain to do if you have to constantly change […]
Becky spotted this delightful improvisation from Dutch artist Helmut Smits. Now we need somebody to put a printer in a windshield wiper blade that can print out graphics across the windshield and/or wipe them off on command. Or maybe a windshield wiper POV display? [via CRAFT]
Last summer, a commenter on my tutorial about how to make one of these from a shampoo bottle said, “instead of drilling a hole in the bottom of the bottle, you could cut off the bottom, flip the bottle upside-down and voila – hole.” Don’t know if there’s any causal link between that tutorial and/or that comment and/or this anonymous photo recently submitted to ThereIFixedIt, but in any case it does look like a better way to skin the cat. [Thanks, JP!]
Jonathan Johns, a coworker of ours over at O’Reilly Media and a frequent volunteer at Maker Faires, sent us a great little mending-in-the-wild story that we think everyone will enjoy. My son, Christian, and his two roommates were on spring break in Arizona. As they were climbing up and around the hills, Christian’s cargo shorts […]
