When I was a teen, I was fascinated by alchemy — not so much the whole turning lead into gold part or trying to play God and create tiny little humans in a jar. I was really attracted to the labware, the furnaces, the study of the physical and natural world and its processes — […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Making geometric structures from commonly-found objects can result in some interesting effects. Here, sixty bicycle reflectors are joined into a spherical geometric construction by Nick Sayers. To connect them, he drilled four holes in each and fastened them together with small cable ties. Another example is this […]
When 17 year old Hayden Parker says he’s a backyard scientist, he means it literally. He’s converted the family backyard BBQ area into an outdoor chemistry lab where he shoots videos of his experiments. It’s a little harrowing watching him do some of these procedures, such as synthesizing nitric acid, and making some critical mistakes […]
Science bad boy Theo Gray shows you how to create lightning bolts in a piece of acrylic. OK, so you need the juice of a five-million-volt particle accelerator to get the effect seen here (via the Kent State Neo Beam’s Dynamitron): With the Dynamitron – rented for the day – adjusted to around three million […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Kirigami is a traditional art of cutting paper. Ulrich Mikloweit takes it a step further by assembling many pieces of kirigami into intricate mathematical models. This is a snub dodecadodecahedron made from 924 cut and colored facets. Ulrich has dedicated years to making hundreds of such hand-cut […]
Those who follow Jeri’s mad-scientist-like curiosity and sci-tech explorations in her many YouTube vids know that she’s recently been hot to create electroluminescence. In this vid, she tries to make her own phoshor. It didn’t quite work out, but she explains the process and then shows something cool that she did discover, triboluminescence, the optical […]
Just last week we mentioned the OpenPCR project and included a link to their Kickstarter page. Throughout the week support for the project poured in from all over the Internet and eventually the project surpassed their initial target. Then on Friday the project hit a snag. The heated lid that warms the top of the tubes kept burning out. That’s when Tito Jankowski decided to post a question soliciting feedback on O’Reilly Answers.
