DIY science is the perfect way to use your creative skills and learn something new. With the right supplies, some determination, and a curious mind, you can create amazing experiments that open up a whole world of possibilities. At home-made laboratories or tech workshops, makers from all backgrounds can explore new ideas by finding ways to study their environment in novel ways – allowing them to make breathtaking discoveries!
Lots of experiments and demonstrations on paper plates. Welcome to a unique genre of education materials. Paper Plate Education is an initiative to reduce complex notions to simple paper plate explanations. This website promotes innovative hands-on Activities that you can experience across a range of interests, at varying degrees of complexity, and at a low price—all with common paper plates. Link.
California residents wondering if tomorrow’s forecast will be sunny now can find out if there’s also a chance of afternoon tremors. For the first time, they can check a daily earthquake forecast on the Internet just as easily as they check the weather. I wish they’d publish the data source so we could make some “real” ambiant-orb like displays, physical projects that “shake” a map and web widgets with this. Current Forecast. Link.
This sounds like one of our News from Future topics– The Federal Aviation Administration proposed on Thursday to amend its regulations to ensure that it can enforce a law that prohibits “obtrusive” advertising in zero gravity. “Objects placed in orbit, if large enough, could be seen by people around the world for long periods of time,” the FAA said in a regulatory filing. [via] Link.
Sgt. Greg Papadatos of the 69th Infantry Regiment has posted some details about how soldiers in Iraq are using Radio Controlled cars to test objects to see if they’re bombs. When they find unidentifiable debris in the road, E.S. sends out his little RC car and rams it. If it’s light enough to be moved or knocked over, it’s too light to be a bomb, so we can approach it and get rid of it. If it’s heavy, we call EOD. At night, they duct tape a flashlight to the car. Link.
The LED bed uses Red, Green, and Blue LEDs, it works the same way asr TV or computer monitor works, Red+Green=Yellow, Red+Blue=Purple. The Maker has a how-to, photos and a kit if you don’t care to build your own. Link.
The Gumball 3000 is a somewhat underground race London to Monaco through Hungary. Jalopnik has a round up of the coverage. Lots of live pictures, blogs and more. Last year my pal Alex Roy won one of the categories with his DIY police car- You can see the transformation and more about Gumball 144’s “Polizei” entry here.
I’m going to try to round up some Science listening or watching each week- Science Friday: Self-Replicating Robots / Science of Sexual Abuse & Stem Cell Spinal Cord Treatment / Science and Technology in the UK. The power chat with Sir David King was really great, you can conserve resources and grow economies it seems. Subscribe to the Podcast here. Eyes of Nye has Addiction and Antibiotics as the two episodes that came over my TV recorder. It would be great to get a non-Flash version of the eyesofnye site, RSS feeds and an easy way to link to the content on the site- there’s great stuff hidden in there. Link.
