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!
“Statlab” by Dutch artist Tjerk Stoop, is an environmental art project that samples local air quality and displays the average CO2 levels through a chemical reaction where chalk particles are dynamically formed. The result is a graph “where the difference in the amount of chalk particles per tank is a global measure for the fluctuating […]
From the Core77 blog: The AEOLUS race, to be held in the Netherlands later this month, pits competing single-person land yachts against each other, with the requirement that they sail directly into the wind. The vehicles are therefore quite different from the sail-powered craft of old, using wind turbines to harvest energy and translate it […]
Here’s what you need to know to make a quick, very serviceable compost bin out of four wooden shipping pallets. Pallet Compost Bin
Design~Build~Live is one of a healthy number of groups in Austin doing their part to fill us all in on the ‘no-brainers’ of sustainability: measures where you don’t make a sacrifice to green your life but rather end up with a ‘better than polluting’ outcome. To steal a Worldchanging catchphrase, they’re trying to create a […]
The above graphic is from a book that does not stink: The Humanure Handbook. Here’s a pdf version of this potential soution to water overuse. As author Joseph Jenkins notes, “a single person using a Clivus (pronounced Clee-vus) Multrum [specific type of composting toilet] will produce 40 kg (88 lbs) of compost per year while […]
The “CotsBots” are inexpensive, modular mobile robots created from off-the-shelf components. The bots are “meant as a platform to investigate algorithms, cooperation, and distributed sensing in large robot networks.” Each bot includes built in radio communication, and are written in TinyOS, an open source system for large-scale distributed sensor networks. Pretty cool idea that we […]
When Austin clothing designer, Kathie Sever, and writer, Bernadette Noll, learned about Swap-O-Rama-Rama at last year’s Maker Faire, they were inspired. Not only did they see the environmental benefit of upcycling unwanted clothing, but they also appreciated the opportunity to get creative and make something their own. When they took that inspiration home to their […]
