Lucky Makers drive pots of gold in St. Patrick’s Day parade
The folks over at the Milwaukee Makerspace built these fine Pot O’ Gold floats to drive in a St. Patrick’s Day parade.
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!
Make a lab centrifuge out of a salad spinner
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 […]
Featured Maker: Nicholas and Felice
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.
Cajun Crawler: If Theo Jansen designed a Segway
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 […]
You can be identified by the germs you leave behind
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.
Gadget Freak Case #160: Chase the Stars with a Camera
Latest Gadget Freak – Case #160: Chase the Stars with a Camera @ Design News… Who hasn’t looked at the night sky and asked in awe, “How can I capture that?” A motor-driven star tracker won’t let you grab a star, but it will let a camera track the movement of the stars so you […]
Brilliant low-tech soil moisture sensor
Two galvanized nails set in a plug of plaster-of-Paris. That’s it. The Cheap Vegetable Gardener, who created the sensor for an automated grow box project, explains:
Technically a gypsum block measures soil water tension. When the gypsum block is dry it is not possible for electricity to pass between the probes, essentially making the probe an insulator with infinite resistance. As water is added to the problem more electrons can pass between the probes effectively reducing the amount of resistance between the problem to the point when it is fully saturated where the probe has virtually zero resistance. By using this range of values you can determine the amount of water than exists in your soil.
[via Hack a Day]