Ever notice how unevenly some foods can cook in a microwave oven? San Francisco area maker Zeke Kossover came up with this clever method for visualizing the microwaves inside a microwave oven by embedding a matrix of tiny neon lamps inside a sheet of acrylic.
Want to discover the chemical make-up of distant stars and planets? Use a spectroscope. It displays a little rainbow of visible-light spectrum that’s emitted by a star (or reflected by a planet). Each element in the periodic table has its own spectral signature — say, bright emission lines in the red band, or dark absorption […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Back in March, this column showed a 3D Hilbert curve made of 64 PVC plumbing elbows arranged in a 4x4x4 cube. Chaim Goodman-Strauss has since outdone himself with an 8x8x8 cube of 512 steel elbows that he made with Eugene Sargent: It is springy, but strong enough […]
Working at O’Reilly Media headquarters, I’d been hearing the buzz about the new book Cooking for Geeks for quite some time, so I was thrilled when I saw author Jeff Potter filming a video in the Make: Labs on how to hack your slow cooker into a sous vide rig. Anyone interested in the science […]
Blackbird wind cart. Photo: Steve Morris Introduction By Mark Frauenfelder In 2007, MAKE projects editor Paul Spinrad sent me a link to a YouTube video of a wind-powered cart, made by a Floridian named Jack Goodman, that seemed to be able travel directly downwind faster than the wind. How could a wind-powered cart outrun a […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics As announced a few weeks ago in this column, I made a large mathematical artwork at a public “sculpture barn-raising” on the National Mall in Washington DC last weekend. Hundreds of people helped me screw together these 490 laser-cut triangles into this structure which illustrates a discretization […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Here is a weaving challenge for serious makers: Can you take a single length of wire and weave it into a 3D donut surface as shown in this image? The two ends of the wire are joined with a small crimp, so it is all one continuous […]
