Country Scientist — Snow Science
We’ll explore some of snow’s characteristics and effects on the environment, aside from the moisture it provides.
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!
The Solar Catenary Reflector
Build 21st-century renewable technology using 17th-century mathematics.
Muon detector using Geiger counter tubes
From the MAKE Flickr pool Robert Hart posted a test run of his Cosmic Ray Muon Detector which uses three parallel Geiger–Müller Tubes. Simultaneous readings on all three tube sensors indicates the momentary presence of cosmic radiation. Robert built this device to assist in testing a similar unit which uses common fluorescent tubes for detection. […]
Anamorphic parking garage signage
The positive response to my earlier anamorphic Pac-Man post led me to dig up this oldie-but-goodie from Boing Boing. This “UP” signage is only one of several anamorphic signs from The Eureka Tower Carpark in Melbourne, Australia. The anamorphic projections, designed by Axel Peemöller, only read properly when viewed from the correct angle.
Anamorphic Pac-Man scene
YouTube user brusspup created this anamorphic projection of Pac-Man chasing a ghost across a complex surface in his apartment. It only looks right from the one angle; as the camera moves away, you start to see how the lines have to wander willy-nilly across the walls to create the effect. [via Neatorama]
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]
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]