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!
Rob Carlson, author of Biology is Technology: The promise, perils, and new business of engineering life, was recently in the Bay Area to deliver a talk to the California Assembly Select Committee on Biotechnology. His presentation focused on the role of small businesses and garage hackers in innovating the new bioeconomy. You can see his […]
If you’re interested in materials science, design, architecture, and/or chemistry, and you live in Austin or the central Texas area, you should not miss the UT Austin School of Architecture Materials Lab, located in room 3.102 of the West Mall Office Building on The University of Texas Campus. They’re closed this week for Spring Break, but are normally open from 9-5 every weekday. It’s open to the public, and is chock-a-block with physical samples of all kinds of exotic materials that would otherwise be difficult to get your hands on in small quantities. Anyone can poke around, and registered students can check out samples just like a book-library.
If you’re not in the area, the UTSOA Materials Lab is building an online database of its collection organized by composition, form, properties, process, and application. And although they don’t have photos of all the samples uploaded yet, it’s still fascinating browsing.
The folks over at the Milwaukee Makerspace built these fine Pot O’ Gold floats to drive in a St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Forget the laboratory supply store, you can score a centrifuge on late-night TV! I recently visited a lab that had a salad spinner on their lab bench and at first I wondered if they were putting together a salad lunch there but when I took a peek I got a nice surprise. It turns out […]
We hit independent Oregonian jewelers Nicholas and Felice’s Pi Pendant and Pi Earrings for Pi Day this last Sunday, but, as you can see from these pics, they’ve got cool handmade jewelry for geeks of all flavors. If you’re a chemist, for instance, you might appreciate their Atomic Symbol for Silver Necklace, shown above, either as jewelry or as a gorgeous (and attractively labeled) silver specimen for your elements collection.
This Segway-style transportation device uses famed kinetic artist Theo Jansen’s style of bug-like locomtion. I think the rider appears to surf on another creature, perhaps a crayfish? Cajun Crawler [via @EMSL] More: Theo Jansen papercraft walker Theo Jansen-inspired Arduino walker Interview with Theo Jansen… Reader mail: Theo Jansen signs MAKE! Lego Segway needs only NXT […]
A study by Noah Fierer and co-workers at the University of Colorado at Boulder suggests that the mix of bacterial flora each of us leaves behind on, say, our computer keyboard or mouse, may be sufficiently unique to identify us:
“Each one of us leaves a unique trail of bugs behind as we travel through our daily lives,” said Fierer, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. “While this project is still in it’s preliminary stages, we think the technique could eventually become a valuable new item in the toolbox of forensic scientists.”
The study was published March 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors on the PNAS study included Christian Lauber and Nick Zhou of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, Daniel McDonald of CU-Boulder’s department of chemistry and biochemistry, Stanford University Postdoctoral Researcher Elizabeth Costello and CU-Boulder chemistry and biochemistry Assistant Professor Rob Knight.
Using powerful gene-sequencing techniques, the team swabbed bacterial DNA from individual keys on three personal computers and matched them up to bacteria on the fingertips of keyboard owners, comparing the results to swabs taken from other keyboards never touched by the subjects. The bacterial DNA from the keys matched much more closely to bacteria of keyboard owners than to bacterial samples taken from random fingertips and from other keyboards, Fierer said.
Here’s the abstract for Fierer’s paper at PNAS.
