Using a mixture of titanium dioxide, drywall plaster, aluminium powder and ground fluorite, Theo Grey of PopSci.com was able to smelt his own titanium, via a thermite reaction. The results are not pretty, and you probably don’t want to try this at home, but hey, DIY titanium! Yet I was able to make titanium using […]
Windell has created a new free snowflake drawing program. He writes: A new application to draw your own snowflakes and save them in PDF format. Clean, cross-platform, open-source, and able to generate closed-polygon vector shape output. Oh yeah. …while there are some nice snowflake program out there, we didn’t actually come across any that were […]
We gave owl pellet dissection kits as party favors a couple of years ago – they’re easy to put together and make great holiday gifts! We included a couple of owl pellets, dissecting forceps, a magnifier (we like the Private Eye loupe, you can nest them for higher magnification) and a Riker box to display […]
Adventures in Ethics and Science blog has a nice mention of the MAKE Chemistry Gift Guide. I was marveling at the Chemistry gift guide at MAKE. It has lots of cool items for your budding chemist/mad scientist of any age looking to equip his or her basement/garage/treehouse laboratory. (It’s pretty hard to get fume-hoods installed […]
Think Anatomy points us to Anatomy Arcade, an anatomy learning site with free flash games, including Poke-A-Muscle, Whack-A-Bone, and a bunch of cool jigsaw puzzles.
Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo is in the process of building a new Humboldt penguin exhibit that conserves energy; they’re installing a natural filtration system, and they’re using geothermal energy to keep the pool at a penguin-pleasing temperature range of 50-60 degrees Farenheit. State-of-the-art engineering allows the new penguin exhibit to help us reduce our environmental […]
We’ve covered this simple kitchen-table science project before: how to make a spectrometer from a cereal box and a CD. Here, PopSci offers a 5-minute video on the project. More: A CD – cereal box spectrometer
