Collaborate Disseminate
Most of us have a junk drawer, full of spare parts yanked from various places, but also likely stocked with materials we bought for a project but didn’t use completely. Half a gallon of wood glue, a pile of random, scattered resistors, or in [Ken]’s case, closed-cell silicone foam. Wanting …read more
Aerogel — that mixture of air and silica — is one of those materials that seems like a miracle. It is almost not there since the material is 99% air. [NileRed] wanted to make his own and he documented his work in a recent video you can see below.
If …read more
Continue reading Making Aerogel, It’s Not For The Faint-Hearted
Epoxy resins are an important material in many fields. Used on their own as an adhesive, used as a coating, or used in concert with fiber materials to make composites, their high strength and light weight makes them useful in many applications. [Tech Ingredients] decided to explore how combining basic …read more
Continue reading Using Additives For Better Performing Epoxy
Despite being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is home to a surprising amount of ice. Now, researchers at Georgia Tech have put forward an explanation for how at least some of it got there – and it turns out, the heat plays an important role.Cont… Continue reading Mercury may paradoxically use intense heat to make huge amounts of ice
Remember those actions movies like The Fast and the Furious where cars are constantly getting smashed by fast flying bullets? What would it have taken to protect the vehicles from AK-47s? In [PrepTech]’s three-part DIY composite vehicle armor tutorial, he shows how he was able to make his own bulletproof …read more
Continue reading Bullet-proofing Your Car With An Affordable Composite Armor
We know this project is supposed to be about developing a fine-looking ferrofluid clock, and not about the value of procrastination. But after watching the video below, see if you don’t think that procrastination has taken these two students further than expected.
We first ran into [Simen] and [Amund] several …read more
Continue reading Tracking Wasted Time With A Ferrofluid Clock
Working in a university or research laboratory on interesting, complicated problems in the sciences has a romanticized, glorified position in our culture. While the end results are certainly worth celebrating, often the process of new scientific discovery is underwhelming, if not outright tedious. That’s especially true in biology and chemistry, …read more
If you came here from an internet search because your battery just blew up and you don’t know how to put out the fire, then use a regular fire extinguisher if it’s plugged in to an outlet, or a fire extinguisher or water if it is not plugged in. Get …read more
Probably the most efficient way to convert solar energy into electricity is the old fashioned way, heating water into steam and turning a turbine. This remains a messy affair though and you don’t really want a steam boiler on your roof, so solar cells are popular. However, there’s some new …read more
It’s Nobel season again, with announcements of the prizes in literature, economics, medicine, physics, and chemistry going to worthies the world over. The wording of the Nobel citations are usually a vast oversimplification of decades of research and end up being a scientific word salad. But this year’s chemistry Nobel …read more