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!
Natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and man-made tragedies like soldiers or civilians losing limbs to explosives drive the need for better prosthetic limbs. Improved treatments are on the horizon in the form of novel foot and ankle prosthesis which behave energetically more like the human body than existing technologies. These powered devices can […]
As an organic chemist, my thoughts went immediately to the idea of somehow sticking them together to make giant molecular models. It occurred to me that if you removed the access cover from one sphere you could fit the resulting opening over the surface of another sphere, glue them together, and have something that looked a lot like a space-filling model of, say, methane. So I bought five of the things–four small “hydrogens” and one large “carbon”–and got in the car to go home.
But this video of Penn State’s Breazeale nuclear reactor “pulsing” is the first time I’ve ever seen any moving pictures of the phenomenon, which are somehow way more impressive. And since this is a phenomenon few of us will ever have an opportunity to witness first-hand, the 15 seconds it takes to watch the video definitely count as time well spent in my book. Note how the blue glow persists for some time after the reactor itself has been shut off.
Really amazing. What’s going on in this cool time-lapse video from Italian YouTuber wwwperiodictableru isn’t a chemical reaction per se–it’s not oxidation or some other type of traditional corrosion. Turns out metallic or “white” tin spontaneously changes its so-called alpha crystal structure at temperatures below XX to the crumbly beta structure of “gray” tin. It’s the same stuff before and after–just different allotropes of the same element. The transformation, known as “tin pest” (Wikipedia), catalyzes itself–once it starts it just gets faster and faster.
Mark posted this on Boing Boing and it made my heart all a-flutter. It reminded me of both my first car, St. Francis the Wonder Car, a yellow, ’63 VW bug, and the John Muir book, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, that kept it going. The car was called St. Francis ’cause a lot […]
Jason Rollette’s remotely-operated submarine packs four 500gph and two 1,250gph bilge pumps, with the bigger ones used for propulsion. Check out his incredibly detailed tutorial for instructions on how to build your own. [via Hack a Day] More: Record-vying transatlantic robot submarine at sea Beached submarine home theater Chinese maker’s homemade submarine
This is a video, from YouTuber OliKills, showing two guys using a thermal lance (Wikipedia), also called a “thermic lance” or “burning bar,” to cut through a lump of concrete. It really gets going about 20 seconds in, and by the end of the video a white-hot stream of molten concrete “lava” is clearly visible running across the pavement.
