Jessica at Nervous System writes: I created this design yesterday for the Shapeways SIGGRAPH competition which asked designers to submit any design that costs less than $200 to 3dprint. Our submission is a sculptural vase generated by reaction diffusion, a process which simulates how chemicals diffusing across a surface react with one another to produce […]
Depending on your tolerance for preserved corpses, this may strike you as incredibly cool or incredibly creepy. Maybe a little bit of both. Personally, I lean toward the “cool” side. “Clearing and staining” is actually a very old technique in anatomy and biology in which a dead animal is treated with a series of chemicals that simultaneously preserve it, render its soft tissues transparent, and stain its skeletal and nervous systems different colors. The resulting preserved specimens are both scientifically useful and, often, strikingly beautiful. These pictures are from a Japanese gallery; here’s an English-language gallery of mutant frog specimens that are also pretty amazing. [via Core77]
Blow-molding (Wikipedia) is an thermoplastic forming process in which a hot polymer pre-form is injected with gas to press it against the inside of a hollow mold. It’s how most plastic bottles are made. Designer George Fereday got annoyed that the primarily-industrial process was so inaccessible and decided to build his own DIY version, which extrudes pre-melted polymorph plastic through a custom die attached to a normal caulking gun to create the hollow pre-form. There’s more detail over at Core77.
Science bad boy Theo Gray shows you how to create lightning bolts in a piece of acrylic. OK, so you need the juice of a five-million-volt particle accelerator to get the effect seen here (via the Kent State Neo Beam’s Dynamitron): With the Dynamitron – rented for the day – adjusted to around three million […]
I actually don’t care too much, personally, for the way this looks, but serious kudos to designer Nicola Zocca for outside-the-box thinking. What other clever off-label uses for polyolefin shrink film are we missing? [via NOTCOT]
The Slow Glow lamp, by NEXT architects for trendy Dutch design collective Droog, is a really simple, cool idea: The bulb is surrounded by a blob of a low-melting point oil (soya oil) that clarifies as the bulb melts it and thus causes the light to gradually brighten over the course of a couple hours as it is turned on. As you can see, it’s just a cork ring, a lamp kit with a tubular bulb, and a few bits of lab glass. But they want $790 US for it from their online store. Which, by the way, is one of those annoying pages that disables right-clicking. Gonna add this one to my personal re-make pile.
Those who follow Jeri’s mad-scientist-like curiosity and sci-tech explorations in her many YouTube vids know that she’s recently been hot to create electroluminescence. In this vid, she tries to make her own phoshor. It didn’t quite work out, but she explains the process and then shows something cool that she did discover, triboluminescence, the optical […]
