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!
William Stranger specializes in building furniture out of repurposed wood. I especially liked the massive coffee table whose top is a four-inch-thick slab of bowling lane. It’s part of a exhibit(?) called Second Growth: A second growth forest is one that has re-grown after it has been heavily logged or clear-cut. The installation of reclaimed […]
Spaceflight is complicated, with many constraints and requirements that must be met before all systems can claim “go” for launch. Unfortunately for STS-130, this evening’s “dynamic” weather proved to be too risky for this morning’s launch. Endeavour’s first launch attempt was scrubbed at 4:30 AM EST. The good news? We get to try it again […]
I’m here at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in preparation for the launch of STS-130 and the Space Shuttle Endeavour. After a brief spell of heavy rain last evening, the skies cleared, making a perfect backdrop for this morning’s retraction of the Rotating Service Structure to reveal Endeavour in all her glory. Endeavour […]
The quantum-logic clock, which detects the energy state of a single aluminum ion, keeps time to within a second every 3.7 billion years. The new timekeeper could one day improve GPS or detect the slowing of time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. [via Wired Science]
Interesting article over on TwistedSifter about the use of so-called “dazzle” or “razzle-dazzle” camouflage beginning during WWI. (The Wikipedia article is pretty good, too.) It’s a kind of practical op-art: The idea was not so much to make the ship invisible against the background, but to confuse enemy weapons operators as to its distance and heading. The Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online collection of various paper plans for dazzle camouflage schemes donated by Maurice L. Freedman, who was district camoufleur for the 4th district of the U.S. Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation, and would go on to invent the board game “Battleship.”
British artist Tessa Farmer makes these amazing little vignettes featuring 1-cm-tall skeletal fairies made from “bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects” pitted against actual insects and other, larger taxidermied critters. Both creepy and awesome. Crawsome? [via Dude Craft]
YouTuber 36AM3B has lots of cool deployable-structure models in his channel, including an expanding frame (visible to the rear in this video) made from 5 of these 6-bar linkages. I got interested in Bricard linkages because of this recent model from Thingiverse user raju, which purports also to be a 6-bar Bricard linkage but looks, to me, an awful like what I’ve always called a kaleidocycle or flexahedron.
