Julie Yu, a post-doc at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, has a really good collection of unusual home lab activities on her page, including a home column chromatography experiment using common materials, which is the first of its kind I’ve seen.
A research team at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems (ENAS) in Chemnitz, Germany, led by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Baumann, have developed a 1.5V battery that weighs less than a gram, is less than 1mm thick, and can be printed using a process similar to that used in silk screening. The new type […]
Science Fair project FOR THE WIN! According to a piece on Wired Science, a 16-year-old high school student, Daniel Burd, from Waterloo, Ontario, has figured out a way to quickly decompose plastic (like that used in shopping bags) by letting bacteria eat it. He presented his findings at the high school science fair. The Record […]
In response to our post of the “BuckyBalls” magnetic beads, Mister Zed pointed us to this cool Bill Beaty demo of super magnetic beads and the behavior of their magnetic fields in loops and chains. Bill also shows how you can make a simple compass with the magnets. Lots of other cool info and vids […]
While it doesn’t have anything to do with actual buckyballs, this set of 216 rare earth magnetic balls looks like a lot of fun. I just wish they didn’t cost $31 (with shipping). BuckyBalls [via Laughing Squid]
So. Incredibly. Cool. What is DNA Origami? DNA origami is a powerful method for constructing DNA objects. It involves taking a long, single-stranded DNA backbone (usually about 7000 bases in length) and forcing it to adopt an arbitrary shape using hundreds of short, single-stranded DNA oligonucleotides (each usually 20 to 50 bases long). This method […]
My post last week about shadowgraphy and Schlieren photography generated a lot of enthusiastic responses and not a few requests for a more detailed tutorial. Among the comments was one by Ian Smith, who has a great page here describing his own Schlieren photography set-up. (While you’re there, take a moment to appreciate the fact […]
