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!

3D printing in glass

The Solheim Rapid Prototyping lab at the University of Washington was in the news last March for developing a new 3D printing process that uses ceramic powder as an inexpensive alternative to the pricier substrates that are currently the de facto standard for powder-bed processes. Well they’ve done it again, this time with 20 micron glass powder, which is formed into an object by layerwise application of a liquid binder. When the part is complete, it can be sintered in a kiln to produce a continuous glass part. The official UW online press release includes a telling quote from lab co-director Mark Ganter: “It became clear that if we could get a material into powder form at about 20 microns we could print just about anything.”

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan
Beetleborg, certified Creep City

Beetleborg, certified Creep City

Cyborg insects, hybrids of insects and machines, have been under development in military R&D for a few years now (no, seriously). Now, electrical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed an implantable radio-controlled neural stimulating device that allows them to control, with a fair degree of accuracy, the flight of an insect, in […]

Continue Reading Gareth Branwyn4
Bauhaucycle

Bauhaucycle

This baby was designed by one Michael Ubbesen Jakobsen. From baubike.dk: The BauBike is inspired by Bauhaus design. It is constructed around the geometric shape of the square and the equilateral triangle. The design is stripped down to clean lines and raw material. The design follows a set of formal rules, limiting the geometry to […]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan10
The Belonio stove

The Belonio stove

Alexis Belonio is an associate professor in agricultural engineering at the Central Philippine University of Iloilo City. In 2008 he received a Rolex Award for Enterprise for a rice-husk-burning stove he designed. Belonio’s stove is not complicated, either mechanically or conceptually: A columnar metal burner with the addition of a small intake fan at the base to tip the stoichiometry of combustion towards oxidation, giving a blue, clean, efficient flame that leaves little or no residue. Traditional rice husk burners, by contrast, do not have this forced-air feature and produce a yellow, dirty, inefficient flame that leaves tar behind. The upshot is more efficient use of rice husk biomass and greatly reduced pollution from the many rice-husk burners in use today.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan6
Egg-beater centrifuge may save lives

$2 Egg-beater centrifuge may save lives

Harvard’s George M. Whitesides is arguably the world’s most significant chemist. How arguably? Whitesides has the highest Hirsch index of any living chemist in the world. The Hirsch or h-index is a kind of weighted score based on a numerical analysis of a scientist’s published work which factors in both the number of papers and the number of citations those papers receive by other authors.

Back in October of 2008, Whitesides published a paper in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Lab on a Chip that describes a technique for separating blood plasma for use in various immunoassays using a piece of plastic tubing taped to an eggbeater. The method can replace a $400 bench centrifuge for many purposes.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan18