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!

Maze-traversing oil drops

Maze-traversing oil drops

Physical chemist Bartosz Grzybowski and colleagues at Northwestern University have created a microfluidic system that solves mazes like a lab rat. The system is very simple–besides the maze itself, there’s the dyed drop of acidic oil that actually traverses the maze, the basic hydroxide solution that fills the maze, and the acidic lump of agarose gel that marks the maze’s exit–but results in an apparently complex behavior. The droplet at right actually took a couple of wrong turns and back-tracked to correct them. [via Neatorama]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan2
Cracking ice sheet sounds like blaster battle

Cracking ice sheet sounds like blaster battle

This recording was made and posted by German composer Andreas Bick at a frozen lake in the Berlin area over the winter of 2005. He explains:

Underwater microphones proved especially well-suited for these recordings: in a small hole drilled close beneath the surface of the water, the sounds emitted by the body of ice carry particularly well. The most striking thing about these recordings is the synthetic-sounding descending tones caused by the phenomenon of the dispersion of sound waves. The high frequencies of the popping and cracking noises are transmitted faster by the ice than the deeper frequencies, which reach the listener with a time lag as glissandi sinking to almost bottomless depths.

[via Boing Boing]

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Puschino Astronomical observatory

Puschino Astronomical observatory

Can you hear me Major Tom? Amazing photos from the Puschino Astronomical observatory @ English Russia… The first initiative to create big radio telescopes in the USSR is dated 1951. They were intended to observe the sun radiation and radiation of other space sources on centimeter and millimeter waves. The displays appear to be nixie […]

Continue Reading Phillip Torrone
Got a parking spot for a discounted spaceship?

Got a parking spot for a discounted spaceship?

The schedule for transferring the orbiters may be six months earlier than originally anticipated. NASA also desires to make selections a year before receipt of the orbiters, so recipient organizations will have sufficient time to conduct any fundraising activities necessary to support preparation and ferry costs.

NASA is planning to transfer space shuttle Discovery to the National Air and Space Museum. Shuttle orbiters Endeavour and Atlantis will be available for placement no earlier than July, 2011.

Where would you like to see the Space Shuttles end up? Check out the RFI for specifics.

Continue Reading Chris Connors12
Make: Projects – 15-minute ice cream with a dry ice bath

Make: Projects – 15-minute ice cream with a dry ice bath

Making ice cream with cryogens stronger than water ice is a fairly common chemistry demonstration stunt. The ideal way to do it, as Theo Gray does in his book Mad Science<, is with liquid nitrogen, which is poured directly into the ice cream mixture, with stirring, and causes it to set up in about 10 minutes. Liquid nitrogen, however, can be rather difficult to get your hands on. Most major cities will have a supplier that will sell it to you, but very often they have large minimum orders and/or require that you own an expensive dewar flask into which they may safely dispense the liquid nitrogen. At -196 C, liquid nitrogen is also fairly dangerous to handle.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan23