The most awesome Theo Gray, author of the I-can’t-recommend-it-highly-enough Mad Science, has a post on Powell’s Books blog about his book and the dangers it contains (the subtitle is “Experiments You Can Do at Home — But Probably Shouldn’t”). He writes: Is it irresponsible to write a mass-market book that describes how to do dangerous […]
OK, so, it’s not exactly a song. It’s more like a clicky, morse-codey, geiger-countery sort of buzz. Nonetheless, it is generated by an electric fish, and you can hear it yourself just by wiring a piezoelectric earphone across the water in your fish tank. Provided, of course, that said water contains said electric fish. If […]
Recently, at a party, DC-area artist and photographer Jason Horowitz was lamenting the death of instant Polaroid film. I told him I’d read somewhere online that some folks had figured out (or were in the process of figuring out) how to make instant film so this beloved medium could live on. I made a mental […]
UVA Microbiologist Martin A. Schwartz has a wonderful article in the Journal of Cell Science about the importance of what he calls “productive stupidity:” I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do […]
Using little more than some PCBs from Sparkfun, two micro servos, some right angle headers and screws left over from a junked Gameboy, Jose Torres from RampageRobotics built this pan-tilt robot camera rig (with the help of a Dremel and a soldering iron). The CMOS camera module is from Electronics123.com. Clever use of the bent […]
I was out to dinner the other night with O’Reilly/MAKE’s Brian Jepson, his wife Joan, and our new Make: Online author Kipp Bradford. We were talking about the awesome Thames & Kosmos science and tech kits we carry in the Maker Shed. The conversation inevitably turned to chemistry kits of yore, the beloved kits of […]
MAKE contributor Will O’Brien mounted an ATC3K camera into his skiing goggles in order to grab some first-person action shots. He even created an enclosure for most of the electronics – I thought about some complicated mounting tricks to attache the boxes to the straps, but found that electrical tape worked great. Keep in mind […]
