Spring Cleaning sale in the Maker Shed! Spring is in the air! The snow is melting, the birds are chirping, and we’re looking to do some cleaning in our warehouse. What does that mean for you? Well, for starters, we have a bunch of products on sale in the Maker Shed. We’ll even throw in […]
Admittedly, if you’re not a chemist or physicist, you may find this post as boring as dirt. (Please forgive the simile, microbiologists. I know dirt is actually fascinating.) Then again, it’s not everyday a new element is added to the periodic table.
The latest addition, number 112, was discovered on February, 9th, 1996 at 10:37 PM by a team under Professor Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany, who confirmed its existence by observing a characteristic “decay chain” of radioisotopes (illustrated above) that could only have originated with element 112.
Just a couple weeks ago, on February 19, that discovery was officially confirmed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), who accepted the GSI team’s recommendation of the name “Copernicium” in honor, naturally, of Nicolaus Copernicus, whom most will recall as the first scientist to stand up and declare that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way ’round. The new two-letter symbol is “Cn.”
As part of their campaign to raise money for a new facility, the hackerspace i3 Detroit produced this cute video imploring you to please think of the robots and help their cause.
From the new archive search front page at PopSci.com:
We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
[via The Robot Group mailing list]
Today we are welcoming a new addition to our list of online editors, Katie Wilson! You’ve seen her work over the years as the designer for MAKE and CRAFT magazines as well as our newly designed CRAFT site. In her spare, spare time, Katie designs a range of printed paraphernalia from books to album covers […]
How big is Rhode Island? Well, it’s about the size of… Rhode Island! Sometimes I feel like part of a strange joke living in the national yardstick. So it is with great excitement, yet great concern that I noticed several major hackers will be descending on Little Rhody for QuahogCon. Is the state big enough […]
In a proud tradition of hackable badges at hacker conferences, the fancy folks behind QuahogCon 2010 have designed a really cool looking conference badge. They’ve blurred out some of the key information to help prevent people like you and me (yes, I will be attending!) from getting a head start with writing code for the […]
