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!
James Yawn’s site Recrystallized Rocketry has lots of great information about DIY rocketry, including this great tutorial about mounting a video camera. This hot pink rocket is called the “sugar rush,” because it is powered by Yawn’s homemade potassium nitrate/sugar rocket fuel. [Thanks, Kenneth!]
Bethany Halford’s column in this week’s Chemical & Engineering News drew my attention to BEYONDbones, an official blog from the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, and particularly to a couple of chemistry-related holiday projects. This page teaches how to make a crystalline ornament from pipe cleaners and saturated borax, and this one, how to use washable markers and a coffee filter to make tie-dye-like paper ornaments based on the principle of paper chromatography.
By Jasmin Malik Chua Who says fashion can’t change the world? At Ecouterre, we believe that clothing, like any good product design, can be accomplished in a better, smarter, more socially and environmentally sustainable way, and look amazing to boot. Here, we’ve rustled up seven cutting-edge, eco-savvy design innovations that are rocking the runways and […]
In an age ruled by information great emphasis is placed on processing speed, memory capacity and sensor sizes. The advancement of such hardware is tied directly to the accelerated development of integrated circuits and exponential improvements of the transistor. When news hits that researchers successfully built a working transistor the size of a single atom, […]
The key to the process is that the metallic aluminum is present as a nano-scale powder, and its oxidation by water thus occurs over a huge surface area and therefore proceeds very quickly, releasing amazing amounts of energy. The video starts with the acoustic mixing of the nano-aluminum with water to make a gray paste which is frozen, in a mold, to make a tubular rocket motor. It then proceeds through various test-bench firings and culminates (at 4:00) in the launch of an actual rocket using the mixture.
This tutorial shows how to take apart a spent zinc-carbon dry cell of the common household type. Besides making for an interesting object lesson in electrochemistry, taking apart a spent D-cell, for instance, allows you to salvage many materials which can be of use to amateur chemists–materials which would otherwise probably end up in a landfill. Separated from its reactive components, the leftover parts of the battery can be safely added to most municipal recycling streams.
Although they could probably use some more exciting branding, Concrete Cloth from the UK’s Concrete Canvas company is a pretty cool idea. The cloth, which is draped over forming members and then set by exposure to water (as, for instance, from rain), has a projected lifespan of 10 years.
