By Super Awesome Sylvia and her dad, James Are you curious about experimenting with electronics, but the fear of electric shock or soldering iron burns keep you away? Why not try squishy circuits! With a special recipe of food-safe, kitchen-made, pliable dough developed at the University of St. Thomas, kids of all ages can easily […]
Researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered a remarkable simple and flexible new way to make self-assembling objects, using just inkjet ink and “pre-stressed sheets of plastic” (that is Shrinky Dinks to those of you following along at home).
Cheap DIY GFP and DsRED Detection
Nope, it wasn’t a creepy-crawly fetish that got me reading The Worm Breeder’s Gazette. Rather, it was talking to Kathryn Hedges–a smart, passionate, and well-credentialed scientist and artist–about The Gazette’s tips to make a GFP illuminator on the cheap, that made me sure I had to check it out.
If you’re looking for a way to fill up some of your after school time in the next few months, check out Google Science Fair. Gather up a friend or two and set out to explore science and making while creating an online record of your project and process. You’ll be competing against teens worldwide, but hey, the prizes look worthwhile.
Aged out of the competition? You can help out a team of youth as a teacher or mentor.
Hoffman clamps are extraordinarily handy bits of lab kit. The screw is turned to compress a piece of flexible tubing between two bars, and may be thus be used to completely stop or simply to regulate flow of gas or liquid through such tubing. The screwing action of the Hoffman clamp allows adjustment of the rate of flow infinitesimally from full open to full stop. In amateur apparatus, a Hoffman clamp can often take the place of a glass or teflon stopcock, which is a much more sophisticated and expensive bit of apparatus. And they’re cheap!
Over the weekend I participated in a group led by Jeff Warren of MIT’s Design Ecology group to build DIY spectrographs using recycled materials. It was a fun weekend citizen science project that’s perfect for families. The spectrographs we made weren’t as nice as what you can build for $20, but then again they were built using trash.
Have you ever wanted to take a closer look at an aspect of life – such as how diet effects exercise, how exercise effects cognition, how sleep effects your work… Any field of study is free game. And, if you are reading this, you are qualified to submit an entry! Submit questions and entries to eri@genomera.com. For more details, see here. You have until December 15th.
