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!

Microfluidics with common thread

Microfluidics with common thread

Along the same lines, a reader recently pointed me to this paper in the ACS journal Applied Materials & Interfaces that proposes using capillary action along ordinary cotton thread as a cheap and easy way to prototype, and perhaps even manufacture, microfluidic devices. Although the scale of even fine thread is quite a bit larger than normal for microfluidic research, the accessibility of the technique is pretty intriguing. Among other things, Wei Shen and co-workers at Australia’s Monash University demonstrate that fluids flowing along two thread “channels” can be effectively mixed simply by twisting the threads together, and that, when stitched onto an impermeable substrate, two channels can cross each other, without mixing, by the simple expedient of passing one thread over the substrate and one thread under it at the intersection.

Hand-carved skateboards

Hand-carved skateboards

Doug McKee of Bellingham, WA carves skateboards that look like birds, insects, and sea creatures. The process of carving a skateboard takes a bit of time. The piece is carved out of green wood. Which is to say wet, freshly cut wood. Ideally the wood spits its water at you as you carve. I use […]

Successor to domino toppling needs better name

A so-called “stick bomb,” “frame bomb,” or (worst of all) “xyloexplosive device” (Wikipedia) is an arrangement of flat flexible beams, like popsicle sticks or tongue depressors, that are woven together under tension such that they can be “set off” at one point and sort of explosively disassemble starting at that point, with the reaction propagating away along the structure. Like domino toppling, but flashier.