The Future of The Body: The Soundtrack
Popular Science commissioned contributing troubadour, Jonathan Coulton, to write and record a soundtrack to their current Future of the Body issue. Each of the five songs he has crafted accompanies a feature article in this issue and, using clever lyrics, catchy hooks and secret harmonic frequencies, unlocks powerful regions of your brain not normally used in the reading of magazines. There are five songs, each inspired by an article, and CD cover art for available for download… Link.
Stellarium is an open source desktop planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL, which means the skies will look exactly like what you see with your eyes, binoculars, or a small telescope. Stellarium is very simple to use, which is one of its biggest advantages: it can easily be used by beginners. [
Mike writes “I had a bunch of free time, not knowing what to do, so with all parts that i found laying in my basement, i made a spud gun.I get Make Magazine, so thats where my inspiration came from, they have a nice pdf on there website, and article in there magazine about building a spud gun. It strays a bit from the normal plans for a spud gun, but it does work”. 
Wonderful entry on this old Maker story – David Hahn (born October, 1976) attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in 1994 in his backyard shed in Commerce Township, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at the age of 17. Hahn, nicknamed the “Radioactive Boy Scout”, was an Eagle Scout candidate who had previously earned a merit badge in Atomic Energy after years of basement chemistry tinkering that included small explosions. [
It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret – a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that boosts the car’s high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel. Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. 
More than one billion people – one sixth of the world’s population – are without access to safe water supply. At any given moment, about half of the world’s poor are suffering from waterborne diseases, of which over 6,000 – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water. The aptly-named LifeStraw is an invention that could become one of the greatest life-savers in history. It is a 25 cm long, 29 mm diameter, plastic pipe filter and purchased singly, costs around US2.00. [
