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!
This sounds like one of our News from Future topics– The Federal Aviation Administration proposed on Thursday to amend its regulations to ensure that it can enforce a law that prohibits “obtrusive” advertising in zero gravity. “Objects placed in orbit, if large enough, could be seen by people around the world for long periods of time,” the FAA said in a regulatory filing. [via] Link.
Sgt. Greg Papadatos of the 69th Infantry Regiment has posted some details about how soldiers in Iraq are using Radio Controlled cars to test objects to see if they’re bombs. When they find unidentifiable debris in the road, E.S. sends out his little RC car and rams it. If it’s light enough to be moved or knocked over, it’s too light to be a bomb, so we can approach it and get rid of it. If it’s heavy, we call EOD. At night, they duct tape a flashlight to the car. Link.
The LED bed uses Red, Green, and Blue LEDs, it works the same way asr TV or computer monitor works, Red+Green=Yellow, Red+Blue=Purple. The Maker has a how-to, photos and a kit if you don’t care to build your own. Link.
The Gumball 3000 is a somewhat underground race London to Monaco through Hungary. Jalopnik has a round up of the coverage. Lots of live pictures, blogs and more. Last year my pal Alex Roy won one of the categories with his DIY police car- You can see the transformation and more about Gumball 144’s “Polizei” entry here.
I’m going to try to round up some Science listening or watching each week- Science Friday: Self-Replicating Robots / Science of Sexual Abuse & Stem Cell Spinal Cord Treatment / Science and Technology in the UK. The power chat with Sir David King was really great, you can conserve resources and grow economies it seems. Subscribe to the Podcast here. Eyes of Nye has Addiction and Antibiotics as the two episodes that came over my TV recorder. It would be great to get a non-Flash version of the eyesofnye site, RSS feeds and an easy way to link to the content on the site- there’s great stuff hidden in there. Link.
Might be neat to add this to an actual car PC…This custom mod gives your computer the personality of KITT, the computerized car from Knight Rider TV fame. It slides into a CD drive bay, and only has a single standard power connector. The project is a light display which imitates the dot in KITT’s hood. It looks like the scanning eye of the car’s computer that is so smart it has a personality and acts autonomously. Some people have said the computer shows more emotion and personality than the main actor, David Hasselhoff. Link.
Growing up as an only child, I spent a lot of time with an 8-track playing “robot” called 2XL. You’d get tapes and he’d ask you questions, to answer you’d press a button and then depending what you pressed it would play another portion of a track. It was pretty cool at the time and the Science tape was my favorite. Someone has made a Flash based one with many of the tapes you can try out and play. Memories! Link.
