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!

137 years of Popular Science now available for browsing online

From the new archive search front page at PopSci.com:

We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
[via The Robot Group mailing list]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan6
Fiction science: Aliens, Predator, and Mega Shark infographics

Fiction science: Aliens, Predator, and Mega Shark infographics

The second graphic explains the physics behind what Boing-Boinger Jimmy Guterman has described as “the greatest scene ever in the greatest movie of all time,” viz. the destruction of a cruising jetliner by the eponymous “Mega Shark” from Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. You may be interested to know, for instance, that Mega Shark’s air attack requires that it break the surface of the water with a velocity of 710 km/hr, which is faster than a bullet train but not quite so fast as a Tomahawk missile.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan

Guitar Slide from a Wine Bottle

One interesting historical example of upcycled crafting is bottleneck guitar– or as it is now widely known, slide guitar. The unique resonant sound of slide guitar was originally formed by playing with a glass bottleneck over one finger and running the slide up and down the strings. While the materials for making slides have evolved, […]

Continue Reading Brookelynn Morris4
Meticulously-crafted cell phone case by African “bamboobender”

Meticulously-crafted cell phone case by African “bamboobender”

No, they don’t call themselves that. “Bamboobender” is my hackish take on “sandbender,” which many of you folks will probably recognize as a term coined by arch-cyberpunk William Gibson in his novel Idoru. Very roughly, a “sandbender” is a craftsperson who makes a living by carefully hand-crafting ornate enclosures for mass-produced electronics. We don’t see a lot of that, at least in the first world (although mass-produced after-market “custom” enclosures and enclosure-decorations are common), probably because our personal electronics are still pretty ephemeral to us: we all know we’re probably going to be sporting a new phone and/or MP3 player next year. This example, however, comes from Cameroon, where, I presume, the device turnover rate is a lot lower. It’s the work of teacher and wordworker Lekuama Ketuafor, whose runs a sole-proprietorship cottage industry called Bamboo Magic. [via AfriGadget]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan