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!
From the MAKE Flickr pool Flickr member 5Volt points out an especially historic schematic from NASA’s publicly available Apollo Lunar Module documentation. Its function was to light the appropriate indicator lamps once the module made contact with the surface of the moon – The lights are two (top of drawing) on two different panels, namely […]
Erik over at Homegrown Evolution has posted a how-to on using a milk crate, a five-gallon bucket, and a toilet seat to create a dry waste toilet. Even if the idea of “humanure” and the composting of human waste is a gross-out to you, this might still make an easy camping/temp outhouse toilet. Humanure Dry […]
Rex Research is a great site, chock-full of info about wacky inventions that never made it, including a bunch of free-energy quackery and pseudoscience that’s still a lot of fun if you take it with a grain of salt. One of my favorite pages so far is this collection of weird-ass boats that folks have […]
I’m really digging the collection of user-submitted articles on primitive technology over at PrimitiveWays. So far, one of my favorites is this article, by one Dino Labiste, about how to treat the natural pith in a deer antler to make an adhesive bed for a stub-tang blade.
Back in 2007, Mark hit on Don Wilkes’ 1960s invention (U.S. patent #3,452,175) of the so-called “rolamite”over at boing-boing, quoting a description of it as “the only ‘basic mechanism’ invented in the 20th century.” Basically, a rolamite is a very-low-friction bearing. Rex Research has posted the entirety of a 1966 Popular Science article covering their […]
False-color shadowgram of gunshot from a .357 magnum by Gary Settles at Penn State university. The New York Times has an awesome slideshow of shadowgrams and Schlieren photographs, created by engineering professor Gary Settles, which accompany a 2008 article about his work at Penn State’s Gas Dynamics Lab. The method, which can produce fantastic visualizations […]
A buddy of mine from high school planted this “chia keyboard” as a workplace prank. Says Warren, This took me two tries to get it right. I had to build a moisture trap with toothpicks and Saran wrap to get the seeds to germinate. Here’s an older and more detailed how-to by Johannes Hjorth.
