4 Ways Amateurs Are Advancing Maker-Style Exploration
Makers are reinventing and reimagining the process of discovery with citizen science.
citizen science
Space is for Children
Two pre-teen girls from Seattle successfully launch a picture of their cat on a space balloon to 78,000 feet.
The Weird Science of the Hot Nickel Ball
To me, this is citizen science at its reckless best. Very dangerous, don’t try this at home unless you’re a pro, type of stuff, but still fascinating to watch. The series, called “Red Hot Nickel Ball,” on the YouTube Channel Cars and Water, currently contains 74 videos of a red-hot ball of nickel being introduced […]
Fantastic 3-mile High Rocket Flight Captured with Raspberry Pi Camera
This Portland State Aerospace Society’s (PSAS) L-12 launch in mid-July is beautiful and impressive. PSAS is a student-based open source rocketry group out of Portland State University. They make all of their design files, flight data, documentation, launch procedures, etc. available on GitHub. PSAS has a history of pushing the envelope in amateur rocketry and […]
3D Printable Robotic Telescope You Can Build
When I was a teen, I did an astronomy (and archeology) summer camp one year. As part of it, we got to spend some nights operating the telescope in the teacher’s backyard observatory. He had turned a Sears metal garden shed into an impressive little observatory, complete with a motorized roof that opened to raise […]
What Happens When You Pour Molten Aluminum into a Watermelon?
Over at The Backyard Scientist, they wanted to know what would happen if you poured molten aluminum into a watermelon. The results were surprising. And very cool. I guess the aluminum flowed into the more watery, less dense cavities inside the melon where the water quickly cooled the metal before it could cook its way […]
OpenExplorer Launches with New Adventures, OpenROV Giveaway
This week the adventure-tracking site OpenExplorer is going live to promote the explorer community, and giving away five OpenROVs to encourage citizen exploration.