Biology

Bicycle wrench that looks like a fish skeleton

I designed this multi-wrench years ago but just now finally managed to get a prototype water-jet-cut in stainless steel by my pal, Makers Market seller Dustin Wallace. The design features 21 distinct wrenches for metric and SAE nuts, 3 flat screwdrivers, a serrated cutting edge, a can opener, a wire breaker, a centerfinding tool, and a lanyard loop hole. It’s a long way from perfect–the can opener tooth, the serrated edge, and a couple of the tail-fins that are supposed to serve as flat-blade screwdrivers still need to have their edges ground, and the surface of the tool needs to be polished up quite a bit, but I was so stoked to get it in the mail I just had to share. The DXF file is available for download on Thingiverse.

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Lego fish tank

I’m not crazy about the particular models here, but I really like this idea, from user littlerob904 of Aquarium Advice, of using Lego MOCs to decorate your fishtank. I have visions of a detailed layout that covers most or all of the tank bottom featuring an Atlantis or a R’lyeh theme, with fish chosen to match.

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Ceramic seed grenade

Ceramic seed grenade

At almost $15 US apiece, plus shipping from the UK, you won’t catch me smashing too many of these seed-laden ceramic pineapples in the near future. Give me a half-dozen at that price, packed in hay inside a roughly-stenciled wooden crate (“HAND GRENADE, FLOWER SEED, 6CT, NOT FOR EXPORT”), and we’ll talk. Still, pretty appealing concept–you got the flower power, the military cool factor, and the visceral appeal of smashing a ceramic pot all rolled into one.

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Stunning hyperrealistic glass flower models at Harvard

Stunning hyperrealistic glass flower models at Harvard

In the late 19th century, when biologists and botanists from Harvard were sailing all over the world taking specimens of every living creature they could find and sending them back home for study, a very serious problem arose in the accurate preservation of those specimens. There was no refrigeration and no practical color photography, and fresh plant and animal specimens rapidly decayed into colorless blobs of mush in jars full of alcohol or formalin. So then-director of the Harvard Botanical museum George L. Goodale commissioned German father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka to create photorealistic replicas of fresh specimens in solid glass. The Blaschkas would go on to spend the next 50 years creating more than 3,000 such models, which are still on display at Harvard today. It’s a thing not to be missed in your time on this Earth.

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