View from Inside a Running 4-stroke Engine
Ever wonder what was going on inside your car engine, but were too afraid to open up a hole and just look?
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!
Gentleman’s bulletproof pocket square
Reykjavik designer Sruli Recht is selling a limited number of these kevlar pocket squares made from “military grade lemon aramid” fiber. For some reason, he calls it “DÆmdur,” which apparently means “The Damned .”
How-To: Bamboo electric motorcycle
I love it when school groups make how-to projects. Bay School writes: For our high school senior project, we have created a bamboo electric motorcycle. This project has been extremely fun, challenging, and time consuming; this is not something you can do over a few weekends. The end goal for us was to create a […]
Math Monday: Paper plate geometry
Math Monday: Paper plate geometry By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics The raw material for making mathematical constructions can be found all around you. Bradford Hansen-Smith makes intricate geometric sculptures entirely from paper plates. The above icosahedral form is assembled from eighty folded plates that interlock. This helical form is constructed from 128 […]
I just wish they hadn’t called it “RoboClam”
Details about the device itself are scanty, other than that the clam-sized machine shown in the photo “is supported by a large apparatus of pressure regulators, pistons and more that control such things as how hard the robot is pushed in each direction.” Which leads me to speculate that the prototype, as shown, is unpowered and operated remotely by pneumatics or hydraulics. They’re envisioning applications as a lightweight anchor that could burrow into or out of a sea- or lakebed on command.
Nature by Numbers: linking math to nature
Filmmaker Cristóbal Vila produced this short animation, called Nature By Numbers, which shows examples of how mathematical relationships such as the Fibonacci sequence, golden ratio, and the Delaunay triangulation can be found in the natural world
World’s first aperiodic tiling with a single shape
The problem of tiling a plane has fascinated builders and mathematicians alike since time immemorial. At first glance, the task is straightforward: squares, triangles, hexagons all do the trick producing well known periodic structures. Ditto any number of irregular shapes and combinations of them.
A much trickier question is to ask which shapes can tile a plane in a pattern that does not repeat. In 1962, the mathematician Robert Berger discovered the first set of tiles that did the trick. This set consisted of 20,426 shapes: not an easy set to tile your bathroom with.
With a warm regard for home improvers, Berger later reduced the set to 104 shapes and others have since reduced the number further. Today, the most famous are the Penrose aperiodic tiles, discovered in the early 1970s, which can cover a plane using only two shapes: kites and darts.
The problem of finding a single tile that can do the job is called the einstein problem; nothing to do with the great man but from the German for one– “ein”–and for tile–“stein”. But the search for an einstein has proven fruitless. Until now.
