Craft & Design

A furniture maker by day, Andrew Argyle had been making clocks for years when he discovered that eBay had made previously obscure nixie tubes easy to obtain.

When the Art League of Houston gave two local artists the freedom to transform soon-to-be-demolished houses into one giant sculp- ture, the artists jumped at the opportunity.

Covered in brown shag carpet and propelled by gray, rubberized wheels, Clocky, a mobile alarm clock invented by Gauri Nanda of MIT’s Media Lab, may be the next pet rock.

Twinkies turn into fiery black husks in a few minutes. A Clue board game bursts into flames. A Richard Simmons video melts into a sticky plastic glob. As a concept, it’s funnier than a Letterman stunt — and based on real science.

In the late 90s, bass player Ezra Daly couldn’t find a decent stand-up bass for under $1,000. So he decided to make his own.

So you want to polish up your metalworking skills, you’ve just bought a welder, and you’re interested in mechanical engineering. If you’re like Michael Dowling and Noam Davidson, you acquire a shop- ping cart and build a go-kart out of it.

In the small town of Lebanon, Oregon, you might see Richard Flanagan cruising down an empty farm road in his homemade, jet-powered go-cart. But you’ll definitely hear him.