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!
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!]
Electron Beam Free-Form Fabrication (EBF3) is a rapid prototyping technology developed by Karen Taminger of NASA’s Langley Research Center. Dr. Taminger is prone to market EBF3 by analogy to Star Trek style “replicator” technology, which is nothing but shameless hype. Still, the basic idea is an interesting twist on extrusion-based 3D printing technologies (although there’s not really any “extrusion” going on), and is under development with an eye towards space-based fabrication. Working in outer space would eliminate the system’s major ground-based shortcoming, which is the requirement for maintaining a vacuum or inert atmosphere to prevent oxidation of the weld.
“Know It All No 2 Pencil Set” on Etsy, lovely.
