MAKE subscriber “Cobbler” sent us this video and a note: Remember the first issue? Here’s my video of the homopolar motor project that was featured there. The motor works like a charm. It is mesmerizing to watch and makes a cool conversation piece for your cubicle. Update: The motor Cobbler built is actually different than […]
In this clip from FMCG, Ken responds to Jeri’s capacitor deconstruction with his own very visual (and very mechanical) demonstration of how voltage is generated and how you can build a simple capacitor, with aluminum foil and plastic, to generate charge mechanically and dump it into the cap (analogous to how a Wimshurst machine works). […]
Our pal Jeri Ellsworth and her crew of restless USTREAM-ing hackers are at it again, exploring light polarization, sparking ions, and reversing time. The Fat Man and Circuit Girl
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 […]
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 […]
OK, so, it’s not exactly a song. It’s more like a clicky, morse-codey, geiger-countery sort of buzz. Nonetheless, it is generated by an electric fish, and you can hear it yourself just by wiring a piezoelectric earphone across the water in your fish tank. Provided, of course, that said water contains said electric fish. If […]
UVA Microbiologist Martin A. Schwartz has a wonderful article in the Journal of Cell Science about the importance of what he calls “productive stupidity:” I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do […]
