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August 18, 2009

Awesome DIY water rockets with drop-away boosters

As huge fans of water rockets, we are worshipping Australian rocketeer George Katz and his Air Command Water Rockets team, who are now launching single-stage soda bottle rockets over 600 feet using three drop-away booster engines that separate, NASA-style, when their thrust is spent. The boosters have upward-pointing pins that slip into rings on the main rocket, so they simply slip back out upon burnout.

Water Rocket with 3 boosters from AirCommand on Vimeo.

To make it work, the team devised a clever launch base with an air manifold that pressurizes all three boosters equally, simultaneously with the main rocket. Air Command's insanely good website has video of the launcher build, DIY instructions for drop-away boosters and all aspects of water rocketry including multi-stage and parachute mechanisms, plus build and flight logs for all kinds of crazy rockets. And their launch videos (from ground and onboard cams) are so awesome we want to build a water rocket Cape Canaveral.

Link.

August 17, 2009

August food science Fridays at The Brooklyn Kitchen

Better late than never with this announcement, but The Brooklyn Kitchen is giving two more Food Science Fridays demonstrations this month at their store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 at 4PM: IT'S ELECTRIC!

Tuber Town: We're going to see what kind of kitchen electronics we can run with potatoes and citrus fruits!

Sparks!: Not the malt liquor! We're going to see what sort of minty things we can get to spark in the dark recesses of our mouths.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 28 at 4PM: UP, DOWN AND OVER

How Do You Get An Egg In A Bottle?: We'll demonstrate how temperature and air pressure interact to pull a hardboiled egg into a narrow mouthed bottle. The real question will probably end up: How do we get the egg out?!

Chemical Propulsion: We're going to build a rocket to the moon. Well, maybe not the moon, but we are going to propel things short distances into the air using baking soda and vinegar.

Dry Ice Cream: Making ice cream always feels a bit scientific, especially the old fashioned rocksalt and ice way. But today we're going to go nerdtastic and make ice cream using dry ice.

Their September class lineup is online today, too!

Vortex smoke ring collision

Boom!

The pitch drop experiment

In 1927 Dr. Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland heated a sample of petroleum pitch, also called bitumen, and poured it into a glass funnel, with a sealed neck, set in a ring stand. Three years later, in 1930, he broke the neck off the funnel and set it aside. It took eight years for the first drop of pitch to fall. The experiment has been running continuously ever since, and has produced a total of eight drops to date. The man shown in the photograph above is Dr. John Mainstone, who is the experiment's current custodian.

The most recent drop fell in November 2000, which means the next one should be falling sometime in the next couple of years. The funnel contains enough pitch to run, it is estimated, at least another hundred years. To date, no one has ever witnessed or photographed a drop falling, but that's likely to change with the next one. The University of Queensland maintains a webcam showing a live view of the experiment at all times. The photograph below shows a screenshot I captured of it just this morning:

pitch drop experiment webcam capture.jpg

SuitSat: Hacking for Outer space

SuitSat is one of the best examples of fashion hacking and recycling old apparel that I have ever seen. Russia often disposes of space suits by throwing them into outer space to burn up in the atmosphere. The suits take 6-7 months to burn up. Since the suit is already being launched into space, some ham radio operators thought why not house a satellite inside, where it will be protected for 6-7 months before the suit burns up in the atmosphere. Hence SuitSat was born. The first SuitSat was launched into space on September 7, 2006 when astronauts aboard the ISS pushed SuitSat I into space.

Currently, volunteer ham radio operators around the world are working to launch a second SuitSat in Spring 2010. With some recent changes, this homemade satellite won't actually be housed in a discarded space suit. A special structure is being developed to meet new space and safety concerns. Plans are for SuitSat III to be housed in a suit. SuitSat II will transmit on four frequencies:

1. The satellite will send an audio recording broadcasting the name and call sign of the satellite, the telemetry values of the battery, some temperatures, and greetings from children around the world on 2 meter FM (which can be heard with handheld radios and most scanners). With this will also be SSTV still images from onboard cameras.
2. The satellite will broadcast CW (Morse code) signals with the satellite ID, satellite call sign and call signs from people who have contributed to the ARISS program.
3. The satellite will send BPSK data containing full telemetry and data from experiments contributed by universities.
4. The satellite will also have 16 kHz wide transponder (similar to a repeater) with a 70 cm uplink and 2m downlink SSB allowing multiple contacts to be made at the same time (like on other satellites, AO-7, FO-29, and VO-52).

SuitSat II will have an experiment contributed by Kursk State Technical University which measures the vacuum the satellite experiences as it gets increasingly closer to earth. The most exciting part of SuitSat is that future experiment will be contributed by the public - hackers like you! The devices will be powered for 2 minutes each orbit with +5V at a maximum of 100mA. They will be provided 2 seconds to download 2k of data at 9600 bps over an RS-485 link. NASA is developing a process for submitting experiments, so start dreaming up ideas. I know I already have a few in mind.

August 14, 2009

Designs to deal with the rising tides

The terrific blog Inhabitat has an intriguing article about the winning entries in the Rising Tides competition, wherein entrants came up with ways to deal with what could be a 55" rise in the San Francisco Bay waters in the next century.

From Inhabitat's recap:

Another mind-boggling solution to the high-water mark is Folding Water, by Kuth Ranieri Architects. The proposal is an alternative to the traditional barrier dike: this one placed in the middle of the bay, maintaining current water levels with a series of pump walls and artificial estuaries. It looks invisible: reminiscent of what we hope our future impact to be: undetectable.

The competition ended up with 6 winners sharing a $25,000 prize, and there were a handful of Honorable Mentions highlighted as well. The whole thing -- the competition, the plethora of entries, the thoughtfulness and cleverness of the entries -- was a great reminder to me that makers hold the key to surviving the next 100 years and beyond.

Hans Christian Ørsted

Pt 2106
Hans-C-Oersted-001
Leader of the Danish golden age!

Thanks to Google, hundreds of millions of people are today celebrating Hans Christian Ørsted's birthday without having much of a clue who he is … so who exactly was he? ... Probably not even the physics geeks remember much about Hans Christian Ørsted, although Google's Doodle logo illustrates his key discovery. That is, if you run a current through a wire – in this case, from the battery at the front – then the electricity creates a magnetic field, which will deflect a compass needle. Thus the study of electromagnetism was born, and it's the basis of a lot of modern life: it led to the development of electricity generators and transformers. Remember that next time you flick a light switch.

Periodic table sweater withstands the elements

Rachel over @ CRAFT pointed out this cozy piece of science. Apinnick was knitting a basic sweater for her husband, when they decided to change gears and do something a bit different. Brainstroming commenced -

Baruch is a microbiologist in the pharmaceutical industry. I thought about it and studied his sketches. The angles of the lines and the hexagons looked like a charter’s nightmare and I decided, in the end, that I wouldn’t be able to translate them into knitting, not in the immediate future.

“How about the Periodic Table?”

I pondered for 2 minutes, then said, “That’s do-able.” He photocopied the periodic table from his highschool chemistry textbook and I charted the actinides and lanthanides. Halfway through the lanthanides, I realised that I didn’t need a chart after all and just knitted it directly from the photocopy. Any mistakes were corrected later with duplicate stitch.

Excellent. She even managed to add fungus and bacteria to the sleeves. yah - the names of fungus & bacteria. Check out the project blog entry for more of the story and pics. [via CRAFT]

August 13, 2009

Online resources for the amateur astronomer

Google Sky
Great overview of online resources for the amateur astronomers @ CNET. Don writes -

This week, astronomers will be up in the early morning hours to see Perseids, a meteor shower that has historically proven to put on quite a show. This happens every August when Earth passes through debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet. If you're an amateur astronomer or someone looking to get started with the hobby, you might be surprised to know that there are online tools to help you tonight, when you want to see Perseids, and every other night you go in the back yard and set up your telescope.

10 thousand, billion, billion stars

tdarnell writes -

I've recently discovered an animation that was rendered using the measured redshift of all 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. I've written a short script that leads you through a quick history of both deep field images and this video ends with a fly-through of the Ultra Deep Field. Every galaxy in the image is in its proper distance as viewed from the telescope line of sight. As if this image wasn't amazing enough.

At least 100 billion galaxies... that's 10 thousand, billion, billion stars (10 sextillion). Unfathomable.

August 12, 2009

Intern's Corner: Chladni Plate, the alternate build

MAKE: Intern's Corner
Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.

By Meara O'Reilly, projects intern

I'd been wanting to make a Chladni plate for years, and testing out Edwin Wise's Chladni plate project for MAKE, Volume 16, was just the jump-start I needed to start tinkering around with making my own voice coils and drivers, like this one:

One of my heroes, David Tudor (an experimental music pioneer and John Cage collaborator), used drivers as the basis of his famous Rainforest installations, turning ordinary household objects into speakers and creating suspended "forests" of whispering resonant frequencies.

The transducers that Tudor often used to drive these objects are still available today (Rolen-Star transducers from Stockton, Calif.), and I built a plate reverb a few years ago using a drum cymbal as the plate, driven by a Rolen-Star, and picked up and amplified by a contact microphone.

Read full story

August 10, 2009

Amazingly simple magnetic heat-switching valve

Here's an interesting article about a very clever gizmo by two scientists at Denmark's Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy. It's being hyped as a totally original invention, but the idea is so conceptually simple that I have a hard time believing it's entirely new under the sun. Still, though--very cool.

So, quick science review: If you take a magnetic material and heat it up, eventually it stops being magnetic. The temperature at which this happens is called the "Curie temperature" (named for Monsieur, rather than Madame, Curie). The process is completely reversible: Cool the stuff down again, and its magnetism returns. And it turns out, with modern manufacturing, a very wide range of Curie temperatures is possible depending on the specific materials involved.

What Danish scientists Christian Bahl and Dan Eriksen have done is exploit the Curie effect to create a simple, heat-switching mechanical valve: At low temperatures, a magnetic attraction keeps the spring-loaded flapper in one position, but at temperatures above the Curie point, the magnetic attraction is annulled and the spring drives the flapper into the other position. Like other devices commonly called "magnetic valves," the Bahl-Erikson valve has the advantage that it can be operated without introducing any holes into the valve case, which is handy if you're working with nasty or delicate materials. Unlike other magnetic valves, however, it does not require any kind of external power to operate, and hence is more reliable as a failsafe.

August 7, 2009

Theo Gray on electrochemical machining

In this Boing Boing Video, PopSci columnist and author of the splendid and high-recommend Theo Gray's Mad Science, explains how electrochemical machining (ECM) works and shows off a rig he put together to do ECM in his shop.

The entire how-to can be found at popsci.com.

Carve Steel with Saltwater, Electricity and a Tin Earring (Popsci)

More:
Theo Gray on why "safety" is overrated
Behold: the flaming bacon lance of death!

August 6, 2009

Galaxy Zoo - help classify the Universe

Pt 2086
The age of the citizen scientist continues to be interesting - as opposed to using your computer for a screensaver to help compute bits, you can use the best computer ever - your brain - to help classify galaxies - You can listen to a podcast at SciAm too...

Welcome to Galaxy Zoo, where you can help astronomers explore the Universe - The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer. More than 150,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Zoo 2 focuses on the nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies...
...Over the past year, volunteers from the original Galaxy Zoo project — people like you — created the world's largest database of galaxy shapes. This database is already showing us surprising things about the nature of galaxies. For example, astronomers used to assume that if a galaxy appears red in colour, it is also probably an elliptical galaxy. But with your help, Galaxy Zoo has shown that up to a third of red galaxies are actually spirals. Similarly, there is a much larger number of blue ellipticals than previously thought, including a small but significant fraction of blue ellipticals that are in the process of forming considerable numbers of new stars — sometimes up to 50 times as many new stars as our galaxy.

Heirloom technology: Yazd's windcatchers

When I visited the 3000-year-old city of Yazd, Iran, the old school technology I was most fascinated by is the windcatcher. Seen atop many a building in this arid city with an annual rainfall of 2.4 inches and summer temps frequently pushing 104°F, these towers are the predecessors to the swamp cooler. Basically, the wind shafts on the rooftops have directional ports, and only the one facing away from the incoming wind is left open. The wind gets sucked in and pushed down over water below, and the cooled air is circulated through the house. In the ancient homes I saw, the room at the bottom of the wind shaft had a little pool of water and the sides of the room were often built-in brick benches covered with carpet, where the dwellers would spend the hottest part of the day.

The city of Yazd has an underground water management system called the qanat that taps into subterranean water. This illustration from Wikipedia's windcatcher page demonstrates how the windcatcher tech utilizes the qanat system to cool the air:

August 5, 2009

How-To: Build your own IcyBall

The Crosley IcyBall (wikipedia) is a commercial early-twentieth century portable chemical refrigerator that runs without moving parts or electricity. Cooling is caused by the evaporation and re-adsorption of ammonia into a water-based solution, which is a spontaneous process that can be reversed by applying heat, as from a campfire. Authentic IcyBalls are valuable antiques, but Larry Hall has posted a cool write-up of the one he built for himself using gas pipe fittings.

August 3, 2009

Collin's Lab Notes: DIY Cymatics

Sound can have some amazing effects on liquids - and some downright bizarre effects on non-newtonian fluids such as the conveniently simple mixture of cornstarch & water. I'd experimented a bit with cornstarch cymatics in the past, but never quite matched the writhing results I'd seen from others. Now, after bringing my own small puddle of goop to 'life', I feel pretty much satisfied =]

Some additional pics from the session -

Download the m4v file or subscribe in iTunes

From the pages of MAKE:

Volume 16, Page 122

Home science projects from Exploratorium

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.

August 1, 2009

Make: Science Room - Choosing a microscope

We're in the process of working on a new area of Make: Online that we're really excited about. It's called the Make: Science Room. We'll have a full announcement and launch in a few weeks. In the meantime, we thought we'd give you a teaser of the type of content we'll be offering. The following article, by Bob Thompson, author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, should help you in deciding which type of microscope is best for you. If you didn't want/think you needed a microscope before, you will after you see all of what we have in store in the Make: Science Room and the Maker Shed! Stay tuned...

Choosing a Microscope by Robert Bruce Thompson

Ask any scientist to name the single most important tool for scientific study. Chances are, the answer will be a microscope. Without a microscope, we are limited to what we can see with the naked eye. Using a microscope reveals entire worlds that would otherwise be invisible to us. Obviously, a microscope is essential for the serious study of biology and forensics. Less obviously, a microscope is also an important tool in disciplines as diverse as chemistry, Earth science, and physics.

Every home scientist should make it a high priority to acquire a good microscope. The question is, which one? This article explains what you need to know to choose a microscope appropriate for your needs and budget.

Read full story

July 31, 2009

Humans, bees, wasps living together

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Looks like Rob Cruickshank chills with bees on the daily!

A series of trap nests for solitary bees and wasps, mounted in plexiglas on our back window. The nests are open to the outside, and have plexiglas covers, alowing us to observe the activity from inside the house, as well as piezo transducer contact mics, allowing us to hear the activity inside, via the speakers on the right.

Wonder if he ever has to ask them to keep it down? Oh, I suppose he could just disconnect the speakers. I used to shared a place with a praying mantis ... nice guy, very religious. ... What? Check out the trap nest window on Flickr.

More:

DIY Bee Box

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