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!
Math Monday: Hexagonal stick arrangements By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Interpenetrating hexagonal arrangements of sticks are a challenging mathematical exercise to assemble from pencils. Four different directions are used, as color-coded here. The above sculpture, 72 Pencils, has tiny dots of glue to hold itself together, but you can easily use eight […]
A glass-top table supported by a group of what appear to boulders may be to your taste. If so, that’s cool. This one from Brazilian designer Domingos Tótora is called the Agua Table. But even if not, I thought the process of making the “rocks” from a paste of old cardboard boxes and glue was pretty interesting. I speculate that Sr. Totora actually started out by experimenting with the cardboard-paste process, figured out he could make fake boulders using it, then cast about for awhile trying to find a use for the cool fake boulders he’d just taught himself to make. Slapping a piece of tempered glass on it and calling it a coffee table has worked for a lot of other designers… [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
So the bragging rights I mentioned in Monday’s post about the newly-discovered single shape that tiles the plane aperiodically go to mathematician and artist Edmund Harriss, aka Gelada, who produced these beautiful renderings of the Socolar-Taylor tile in Blender and uploaded printable 3D models to Thingiverse. There’s more info and images on Harriss’s blog, Maxwell’s Demon. [Thanks, Edmund!]
This has to be the craziest DIY town fireworks celebrations ever!
A new month means a new theme on CRAFT, and we’re proud to announce that April is all about gardening! First up is this tackle box planter by Andrew Salomone, which shows you how easy it is to transform an old tackle box, tool box, or suitcase into a tiered home for some plants. Check […]
How to analyze online scientific data.
Real-world problems in physics sometimes take quite a while to figure out, unlike the contrived problems in textbooks that must be solved by next week.
