Hand-tied paracord sling
I’m really digging all the manly knot-tying going on over at Stormdrane’s blog.
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!
Hinged square-to-triangle dissection table
Those of you who appreciated my earlier post about Dudeney’s dissection will likely enjoy this table, commissioned by Joop Van Der Vaart from craftsman Jan de Koning, at Professor Greg N. Frederickson’s page at Purdue.
Grow your own Pumpkinhead
This trick actually came in really handy the last time reckless teenagers accidentally killed a member of my family. It takes several months for the pumpkin to grow into the shape of the victim’s face, but, that’s actually sort of useful because it gives you time to cool down and figure out if you really want to go through with the whole vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave thing or not. If you decide against it, you can always use your hellpumpkin as the world’s creepiest Jack-o’-lantern, which is what I ended up doing. It worked out great, at least until those same reckless teenagers kicked it into a pile of goo on my front porch. That’s irony for you! So now I’m growing another one…
Unpowered Mechanical Gate Opener, the Video
Reader captures footage of a car-powered mechanical gate opener.
Astronauts – the new celebrity?
Rad… Astronaut Mike Massimino became the first human to tweet from space on his final trip to repair the Hubble telescope. It was no contest, however, that he recently also became the first astronaut to reach one million followers on Twitter (@Astro_Mike). Who will be the first chemist to have 1 million followers? Measuring things […]
Stephen Hawking steps down as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University
Hawking now Director of Research at Cambridge… Steps down as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University… A transcription of physicist Stephen Hawking’s audio message to Newsnight in which he explains why he is standing down from the prestigious academic title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Previous holders of the position include […]
Novel edge-collecting solar panels
This is a solar panel. Really. If you’ve observed that it looks a lot like a piece of live-edge fluorescent acrylic, you’re more than halfway to understanding how it works. Light entering the panel from the sides is absorbed by dyes and converted, by some fancy top-secret nano-metal whatnot ingredients, into a kind of internal re-radiation that is collected by conventional silicon applied only at the edges. Fair warning: Full science-hype disclosure rules apply here.
