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!
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”. Link.
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. [via] Link.
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. Link.
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. [via] Link.
...cool project by Canadian engineer Steve Lapp who modified his 2001 Prius by installing solar panels on the roof. It is admitted that the car is still a rough prototype, but so far the fuel economy improvement are of 10%, a respectable figure; for reference, Honda completely redesigned the Honda Civic engine for the 2006 model and achieved a 6% increase in fuel economy… Link.
…build and operate a mechanical device to simulate, remarkably well, what happens when a robotic spacecraft takes advantage of a “gravity assist” on its interplanetary trajectory through the solar system. The device substitutes a strong, moving magnet for a massive orbiting planet, and a steel bearing ball (BB) for a spacecraft. The “magnetic assist” it provides to the BB is closely analogous to the “gravity assist” a spacecraft can receive from a planet moving in its solar orbit. Link.
