Some recent FMCG vids
Our pal Jeri Ellsworth and her crew of restless USTREAM-ing hackers are at it again, exploring light polarization, sparking ions, and reversing time. The Fat Man and Circuit Girl
Science
Library of strange compounds
George Pendle wrote the highly-recommended Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons, the biography of rocket pioneer Jack Parsons (whom I profiled in MAKE, Volume 13). In Saturday’s Financial Times, George writes about the Materials Library at King’s College, London. Deep in the bowels of a brutalist concrete building on the […]
Theo Gray on why “safety” is overrated
The most awesome Theo Gray, author of the I-can’t-recommend-it-highly-enough Mad Science, has a post on Powell’s Books blog about his book and the dangers it contains (the subtitle is “Experiments You Can Do at Home — But Probably Shouldn’t”). He writes: Is it irresponsible to write a mass-market book that describes how to do dangerous […]
The siren song of Gnathonemus petersii
OK, so, it’s not exactly a song. It’s more like a clicky, morse-codey, geiger-countery sort of buzz. Nonetheless, it is generated by an electric fish, and you can hear it yourself just by wiring a piezoelectric earphone across the water in your fish tank. Provided, of course, that said water contains said electric fish. If […]
The importance of being stupid
UVA Microbiologist Martin A. Schwartz has a wonderful article in the Journal of Cell Science about the importance of what he calls “productive stupidity:” I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do […]
Environmental test kits of my youth
I was out to dinner the other night with O’Reilly/MAKE’s Brian Jepson, his wife Joan, and our new Make: Online author Kipp Bradford. We were talking about the awesome Thames & Kosmos science and tech kits we carry in the Maker Shed. The conversation inevitably turned to chemistry kits of yore, the beloved kits of […]
Stone age superglue!
From National Geographic: Ancient people in what is now South Africa whipped up a glue of powdered red ochre and acacia-tree gum to keep their tools (above, a replicated tool with adhesive made by scientists) intact, a May 2009 study says. Stone Age Superglue Found — Hints at Unknown Smarts?
