George Pendle wrote the highly-recommended Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons, the biography of rocket pioneer Jack Parsons (whom I profiled in MAKE, Volume 13). In Saturday’s Financial Times, George writes about the Materials Library at King’s College, London. Deep in the bowels of a brutalist concrete building on the […]
Here is a nice round-up of some simple sneaky inks. The old favorites like lemon juice and vinegar are there, but also some more sophisticated systems using stuff like cerium oxalate and iodine fuming. From the pages of MAKE: Mike Golembewksi shows us how to make an invisible inkjet printer in MAKE 16 – Spy […]
My recent post on glassknapping mentioned Kevin Dunn’s 2003 book Caveman Chemistry, and I’ve received many requests for a dedicated review. So here goes! Caveman Chemistry came to my attention a few years ago through the Lindsay Technical Books catalog. I’m a chemist by profession and a hacker by calling, with a long-standing interest in […]
“Benthic microbial fuel cell” is propeller-head code for the following very interesting fact: If you bury a metal plate a few centimeters beneath the ocean floor, and elevate a parallel plate a few centimeters above the ocean floor, the potential between them (due to ongoing microbial metabolism in the sediment) is enough to generate useful […]
Here’s an easy hack for your Maker’s Notebook that’s sure to get noticed: Buy some thermochromic liquid crystal (LC) film and attach it to the cover! Originally I bought LC film from US suppliers and tried gluing it on. I tested three different adhesives (3M Super77, DAP Weldwood Contact Cement, and Elmer’s Craft Glue) and […]
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 […]
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 […]
