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!
It’s a simple idea: Find some bad art, whether original or a print, for a song at a thrift store, then modify it to make, if not “better art,” then at least something that’s more entertaining to look at. (Is it the same thing? Yeah, that sounds like a productive argument.)
Natural Deselection is an instrument that competes plants against each other. The device empowers plants to control the fate of others using sensors and mechanised shears in a Darwinian race for survival. The sensors set above the plants detect the first to grow to a specified height, at which point it is saved, and the […]
Craig Smith, of Firefly Workshop, has been planning a home observatory and is working out the details of easily building a domed roof for it. He writes: Anybody with a decent telescope knows that a telescope should be cool as the night air to prevent heat radiant distortion. Aside from keeping it out in an […]
Admittedly, if you’re not a chemist or physicist, you may find this post as boring as dirt. (Please forgive the simile, microbiologists. I know dirt is actually fascinating.) Then again, it’s not everyday a new element is added to the periodic table.
The latest addition, number 112, was discovered on February, 9th, 1996 at 10:37 PM by a team under Professor Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany, who confirmed its existence by observing a characteristic “decay chain” of radioisotopes (illustrated above) that could only have originated with element 112.
Just a couple weeks ago, on February 19, that discovery was officially confirmed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), who accepted the GSI team’s recommendation of the name “Copernicium” in honor, naturally, of Nicolaus Copernicus, whom most will recall as the first scientist to stand up and declare that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way ’round. The new two-letter symbol is “Cn.”
Mathematical art in the lava By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Edmund Harris created this geometric sculpture on a 35 year old lava field in Iceland. It can be understood as a simple form composed of equilateral triangles, but the curved edges where the triangles hinge together soften the geometry, giving it a […]
A couple of killer round-ups of science-themed cookies.
Pete Friedrichs, author of the can’t-be-recommended-highly-enough Voice of the Crystal and Instruments of Amplification (which I review in MAKE Volume 21), has posted online his two-part article “Fun With Homebrew Cuprous Oxide Diodes,” which originally appeared in the Xtal Set Society Newsletter. In it, he shows you how to build an old-school Cuprous Oxide-based radio […]
