Adorable wildlife photography bot
Is it me or are Evan Ackerman’s headlines getting funnier every day? This is the BeetleCam, by Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas. [via BotJunkie]
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!
Knitting Green Challenge
Knitting Green by Ann Bud is for knitters who are comitted to the environment and are looking for projects with an organic or recycled twist. Personally I love using organic yarn and I love projects for bamboo yarn for the upcoming spring/summer months. All in all, this book has 20 patterns from sweaters, hats, socks, […]
Math Monday: Whittling links and knots
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Whittling is a traditional technique for making one-of-a-kind objects that doesn’t get enough attention nowadays. A time-old method of demonstrating one’s whittling technique is to carve linked objects from a single piece of wood. The above step-by-step guide shows four stages in making a pair of linked […]
Crate made from seltzer bottle tops
Flickr user Happy Monkey uploaded these shots to the MAKE Flickr Pool. There’s not much info, other than that they’re made with “Vintage seltzer bottle caps and wire.” Would love to know how they’re hooked together. Assuming each cap is about 1″ wide, the finished box is about the same size as a milk crate.
CRAFT Video: Hydroponic herb garden
I had the pleasure of setting up a rooftop hydroponic herb garden for my latest CRAFT Video. It’s the nerdiest way to garden. I hope you’ll check it out! In this week’s CRAFT Video, I show you how to set up a hydroponic herb garden on my rooftop in Brooklyn. Hydroponic gardening uses water more […]
Distributed earthquake monitoring using laptop accelerometers
Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.
“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,’ ” Lawrence says.
Simple and beautiful LED-lit sea urchins
The Evil Mad Scientists created these awesome, dead-simple accent lights by dropping an LED clipped across a battery into a sea urchin shell from a beach shop. Windell describes the guts as a “throwie sans magnet.” I love the way these look. But I hereby pledge to dig in, with both heels, and resist the term “urchie” with all my power, unto my dying day.
