Berkeley-based Vaska, makers of botanical-based laundry soap, is holding a Get Cozy With Vaska Contest, which sounds like it’s right up our alley. Twelve winners will get $300 in cash and a page in the 2010 Vaska Cozy Calendar, sure to be a collector’s item (or so they claim). The contest ends at midnight Jan. […]
Wish you had a skylight, but don’t have the ability to cut a hole in your roof? MAKE subscriber Chris did to, and wrote in to share his solution to the problem: a pv+led-based ‘fake’ skylight.
I love this. Instructables user wholman has gathered together a bunch of scrap wood from “dumpsters, back alleys, vacant lots, abandoned buildings, recycling yards, and architectural salvage centers” and laminated it together using all-thread. Then he’s very carefully smoothed and polished only one side of the finished block, leaving the underside rough to show off the process. Beautiful.
There’s railroad-car homes, offices, hotels–even a railroad-car footbridge.
Capturing the same powerful forces that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge shortly after it was built, researchers at the University of Michigan are developing a new way of generating electricity with the slow moving currents found in most of the rivers and oceans of the world.
William has been a classic maker since he was very young. One of the most powerful stories they told was about how William learned science. The Malawian famine in the early 2000’s resulted from poor rains causing a crop failure. To conserve their resources, William’s family could not afford the tuition for him to got to secondary school. William did, however have access to a library funded with donated books located at his former primary school. He had been exploring and repairing radios for several years, and in the books in the library, he found useful resources for learning physics, electricity generation and magnetism. Though the books were written in English, rather than his native Chichewa, he would find a picture in the book that showed a diagram of a system that interested him. He would then note the figure number below the illustration and go hunting through the text looking for the passage that referred to the image. Once he found it, he would translate that section of text with the help of the other books on hand and the librarian. Through this process, William taught himself physics so that he could build himself a windmill to power the lights in his family’s house.
Here’s what looks like a great, culturally sensitive way to tear down old buildings. D-Build, a project started in Syracuse, NY, is aiming to document and catalog entire decommissioned buildings as they are taken apart.
