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!
Berkeley-based Vaska, makers of botanical-based laundry soap, is holding a Get Cozy With Vaska Contest, which sounds like it’s right up our alley. Twelve winners will get $300 in cash and a page in the 2010 Vaska Cozy Calendar, sure to be a collector’s item (or so they claim). The contest ends at midnight Jan. […]
Klaus Sedlbauer and Herbert Sinnesbichler, of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP), think coffee is perfect at 58 degrees C. So they built a coffee mug that automatically maintains that temperature, tending to cool its contents above 58 degrees, and releasing heat below 58 degrees to warm them back up. It works by use of an interstitial phase change material (PCM, Wikipedia) between the aluminum fins, which has a solid-liquid phase change temperature of 58 degrees. Above 58 degrees, the PCM melts and absorbs heat, and below 58 degrees it freezes and releases heat. Supposedly it can keep a cup of coffee at ideal temperature for 20 to 30 minutes.
If you don’t have any bomb-sniffing bees around to look for trance quantities of explosive gas, why not use your iPhone instead? That’s exactly what Jing Li and a team of researchers from NASA have done with their cell phone chemical sensor.
In high school and college, I was a camp counselor almost every summer, and I highly recommend it! It’s such a rewarding experience and you make so many lifelong friends. So when I found out (from CRAFT’s Rachel Hobson) that they’re looking for counselors for Space Camp, I had to share. So many makers would […]
If that all sounds too complicated, don’t sweat. What I’m going to show in this tutorial is simply how to build a simple piece of apparatus that allows you to collect pure gas samples over water. You can collect carbon dioxide, oxygen, hydrogen–anything you can generate and direct down a hose.
Wondering what something you own would look like under a scanning electron microscope, but don’t happen to have one in your garage? Well, then you might be interested in this intriguing offer from ASPEX: a complimentary SEM scan of your favorite object!
Tim Saylor recently wrote in to me about the Gingery-style charcoal foundry he built for Chicago’s hackerspace Pumping Station: One. There’s a write-up here and a good Flickr set showing construction and use of the furnace to melt aluminum here, including some really pretty shots of the fire and sparks at night. [Thanks, Tim!]
