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!
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 […]
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 […]
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.
Jared Bouck, over at InventGeek, sent us news of this project for building an Arduino-controlled algae bioreactor. Jared is gaga over algae, so much so, he’s created a new site, algaegeek.com. Here he explains his bioreactor design: This project is an easy to use platform for one technique that is broadly being used to trick […]
Yesterday was a big day for anthropology, seeing the first publication of some 15 years worth of analysis of a 4.4 million-year-old fossil skeleton of Ardipithecus Ramidus first discovered by Gen Suwa, then a graduate student of Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White, in Ethiopia, in 1992. Science magazine has made all eleven papers freely available to […]
From Gizmodo: Photographer Ben Cooper took this photo of a Delta 4-Heavy rocket launching at Cape Canaveral using a sound-activated camera. And when your camera is that close to a launch, your lens probably won’t survive. This Insane Photo Destroyed a Camera Lens
That’s right, it’s a wooden sports car. And although the sexy images shown here look PhotoShop-y to me, the body of the car, which is made fiberglass-style out of wooden fibers woven on a custom-built loom, appears really to be complete. You can follow Joe Harmon’s construction of “Splinter” at his site. [via Dude Craft]
