The man behind the world’s largest Tesla coil (the 30,000-watt Electrum) is once again upping the ante on machine-generated lightning. Greg Leyh and his group Lightning On Demand (LOD) have launched a new a project, The Lightning Foundry, that will try to re-create super-long discharge effects normally found only in lightning.
Aerogels are fascinating materials, with lots of interesting and, frankly, amazing properties, but they are not easy to make. These days, industrial manufacture with an eye towards commercial applications, primarily as thermal insulators, is bringing the price down some, at least for granules, but larger pieces still cost around $50 US per cubic inch. Ben Krasnow, impressively, has made his own…
Karol Łuszcz is studying electronics at Poland’s Gdańsk University of Technology. I’d say he’s on-track for an impressive career. This vector-graphics laser projector, his third prototype, includes three laser modules at 650, 532, and 405 nm wavelengths (making it more of an RGV projector, really). Many parts were salvaged, for instance, from a DVD burner, a printer, and a “disco ball.”
A look at ten of our favorite flamethrowers covered here on Make:.
A liquid lens is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The really cool thing about them is that, though they have no moving parts (unless you count the liquid itself), they can achieve a pretty wide range of dynamically-variable focal lengths over a relatively short optical path. When I first read about them, the killer app was supposedly going to be phone cameras.
Though described as an “electronic instrument” and an “orchestra…composed of levitating balls whose physical height determines their volume,” London design group Poietic Studio’s “Floating Orchestra,” cool as it is, cannot possibly be producing the big, bold, brassy sounds of The Benny Goodman Orchestra that accompany their embedded video, above. Which naturally leads me to wonder what it really sounds like.
According to the bio on his website, Jólan van der Wiel admires objects which show experimental discovery and are translated into a functional design. His Gravity Stools demonstrate that perfectly. Using a custom magnetic material and a machine with large magnets to stretch the legs off the seat of the stool, he manufactures a product which is “characterized by the freakish and organic shapes that are so typical of nature itself.”
