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!

World’s first aperiodic tiling with a single shape

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.

The Upcycle Exchange in St. Louis

CRAFT contributor Autumn Wiggins writes: The Upcycle Exchange is a pilot program that realizes some of the concepts I wrote about in Craft: Vol. 9’s “Crafting a Green World” article. I compile a wish-list of specific items local indie crafters are looking for on our website, and when people donate items to us, we offer […]

“Meta” periodic table

“Meta” periodic table

Bill Keaggy, who’s something of a list-artist (his collections of found grocery lists and sad chairs are also pretty amusing), brings us this periodic table of periodic tables. I’ve blogged about the vast number of alternative representations of the periodic table before, and while, apart from the division into themed “blocks,” there doesn’t seem to be any meta-logic organizing Bill’s meta-table that would correspond to the real logic that organizes the real periodic table, it’s definitely an entertaining notion. Static images are available from Bill’s Flickr stream. [via Boing Boing]