Soft Radiators
Swedish designer Hedvig af Ekenstam makes soft decorative radiators from heating cables; I love the patterns, and her name! [via Fashioning Technology]
Technology
Biomedical Lab Uses Shrinky Dinks Instead of $100K Diagnostic Chips
Michelle Khine’s lab at UC Irvine couldn’t afford the $100K equipment to make microfluidic chips, a sheet of material with tiny channels used for certain diagnostic tests, so she made her own with Shrinky Dinks. From the MIT Technology Review: Racking her brain for a quick-and-dirty way to make microfluidic devices, Khine remembered her favorite […]
100 years of technophobia
Ars Technica has an awesome piece detailing 100 years worth of “Big Content’s” reaction to emerging media technologies (in its own words). Here’s John Philip Sousa, writing in Appleton’s Magazine, on “The Menace of Mechanical Music” (aka the gramophone): “From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been […]
Robot sorts pancakes
Who is eating all these pancakes?! PT @ MAKE writes: Wow! This robot sorts over 400 pancakes per minute. Right around 1:15 it gets amazing, it seems like it’s sped up, but they need to slow it down in the video to show it off! Computer vision, robots, and pancakes; I don’t think this morning […]
How-To: Solar Handbag
You can convert any bag into a solar charger for your gadgets, via ReadyMade.
Open Source Embroidery in San Francisco
Open Source Embroidery opens at the SF Museum of Craft and Folk Art October 2.
Spider Silk Weaving
This gorgeous textile is an 11-foot-long weaving made from spider silk, specifically the golden orb spider of Madagascar. The story of how it was made is fascinating and well worth reading (a few tidbits: the saffron color is the undyed color of the spider silk, the threads have five times the strength of steel by weight, and it took more than one million spiders to make the cloth).
