Jack Heathcote is now the proud owner of what, at 4,800 gallons, is reportedly the largest home aquarium in the United Kingdom. What’s more, he designed and built it himself. That’s him diving in the tank (and looking rather strikingly, IMHO, like Abraham Sapien from Hellboy), which is apparently the easiest way to clean the interior. Nice details and pictures over at The Daily Mail. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]
The color is reportedly permanent. Published as Intrinsically Colored and Luminescent Silk by Dr. Natalia Tansil and co-workers at Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering. [via CRAFT]
Sculptor Tom Hardwidge calls his creations “arthrobots.” Many of them incorporate deactivated ammunition. [via Boing Boing]
Cheap DIY GFP and DsRED Detection
Nope, it wasn’t a creepy-crawly fetish that got me reading The Worm Breeder’s Gazette. Rather, it was talking to Kathryn Hedges–a smart, passionate, and well-credentialed scientist and artist–about The Gazette’s tips to make a GFP illuminator on the cheap, that made me sure I had to check it out.
Interesting post from dusjagr over on Hacketeria, who reports success using a 100 mW green laser with the lens from a cheap webcam, in the arrangement pictured here, to make a projecting microscope that will accept conventional microscope slides, and is only slightly more complicated than a Planinsic-type water-drop projector. [via Hack a Day]
The hard way, of course, is to splice in the gene that codes for green fluorescent protein, as in the case of, say that GFP bunny that made the rounds a few years back. That’s a bit of a project, really.
This quickie version, from everybody’s favorite anonymous, Jigsaw-voiced YouTube chemhacker NurdRage, amounts to extracting the fluorescent dye from highlighters into water and, you know, sticking the cut stems down in there for while. To use scientific terms.
Cool enough. And though I’m a big NurdRage fan, I have to protest the use of “glow in the dark” to describe what’s happening here. In truth, these flowers are fluorescent, because they appear to glow in the dark under UV light. But what’s really happening is near-instantaneous re-radiation, of absorbed UV photons, in the visible band. True GITD materials—like those stick-on stars on your bedroom ceiling—work by the entirely different process of phosphorescence. And although it may never be possible to make a living flower truly phosphorescent, there was recently a very interesting advance in the field of phosphorescent materials. [via Neatorama]
Among the more delightful members of the set of all possible World’s X-est Ys, IMHO, is this 3 x 2.4 x 1.4 cm freshwater fishtank from Russian miniaturist Anatoly Konenko. It’s stocked with three tiny zebrafish and outfitted with matching tiny net and bubbler. There’s an English-language piece at The Daily Mail. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]
