Hot Mad Science Posts

How To: DIY Rocket Propellant! How to Cook Solid Rocket Fuels Using Common Household Ingredients

Cooking isn't something that interests me much, unless it results in a fast burning fuel and a successful rocket launch!

How To: Weapons for the Urban Guerrilla: Make a Taser from a Disposable Camera

The agents of empire do not always arrive with warning. When you are besieged, surrounded, and infiltrated, imagination is often your best weapon against the oppressors. If all you have at hand is some duct tape and a disposable camera, fear not, you have the makings of a powerful taser!

How To: Build a Long Range Laser Spy System for Eavesdropping on Your Neighbors

Eavesdropping from a distance can be tricky because it usually requires some sort of bug or transmitter. It's easy to transmit audio through lasers, but you can also use lasers to build a microphone that picks up audio from a distance. LucidScience built the Laser Spy System for about $20. To make your own, you'll need a cheap laser pointer, an NPN phototransistor, a headphone amp, and a few other small pieces listed below. A light-to-sound circuit is installed in a small plastic box with the...

How To: Make a Simple Fog Machine to Prank Your Roommates

Like theme music, I always feel that I need more fog in my life. Fog can be useful for many reasons—warding off smaller siblings from your bedroom, keeping curious hands out of your cupboard, and tricking your friends into thinking there's something horribly wrong with their vehicle. So, today we'll be making a very simple fog machine for small scale applications.

DIY Blacksmithing: Forge Your Own Steel at Home!

Metal is a great material to work with. It's rigid, tough, malleable and conductive, but sometimes the part we need doesn't exist in any store. In order to create custom pieces, you need to either melt the metal and cast it in a mold, or heat it until it's soft enough to shape with your hammer. Properly melting metals can be a bit dangerous in our home shop, but we can make a coffee can forge for all of our home blacksmithing needs.

The Sweet Smell of Success: DIY Smoke Mix with Sugar and Potassium Nitrate

I finally got around to trying out another one of Will's mad science experiments and found out that this one was actually more satisfying (and less frustrating) than my slightly uncooperative jar jet. There's something very pleasing about making potassium nitrate at home in the kitchen and then watching the transformation from semitransparent liquid to spiky, frozen crystals. That was the best part for me, second only to igniting it with its sugar companion.

News: This Thermal Lance Fueled by Bacon (Yes, Bacon) Can Cut Right Through a Steel Pan

You knew that the food you eat gives you energy, but did you know it can actually power a thermal lance with enough heat to burn through steel? A thermal lance, as in, the tool used to demolish buildings and bridges.

Fire Texting: How to Write Secret Messages with Fire

Writing secret notes with lemon juice was one of my favorite pastimes as a child. All it took was a small flame to lightly scorch the paper and reveal the hidden message. Now that I'm tall and pay bills, lemon ink just isn't exciting enough anymore. Luckily, we can use another kind of invisible ink to write in fire! By using the saltpeter, we can whip up invisible fire ink in no time.

How To: Turn a Microwave Oven Transformer into a High Amperage Metal Melter!

In this project, you'll learn step by step how to modify a microwave oven transformer into a high-current device that can pump out 800 amps of electrical current, which is enough amperage to melt metal. If you liked the Metal Melter you saw in my previous project, here's how you can make your own!

Spice Rack Explosives: How to Make Gunpowder with Salt & Sugar

The best chemistry experiments are those you can perform with items already laying around your house. With only some sugar, salt substitute and an instant cold pack, you can make your very own gunpowder! Being able to make homemade gunpowder without a trip to the store can be a lifesaver, no matter if it's just for testing out a Civil War-era musket, blowing up stubborn tree stumps, or preparing for battle when imperialists overrun your country.

How To: Make Slow Burning Fuses from Yarn, Sugar, & Potassium Nitrate

Here's how to make a simple form of a slow burning fuse from materials around the house. WARNING: Ignition of an incendiary or explosive material may not be legal in your area, so check local laws before attempting. Use of this video content is at your own risk.

How To: Build Your Own Mini Altoids Guitar Amp for About $5

I love making beeps and bloops with the Arduino pitches library, but sometimes archaic 8-bit tunes just don't cut it. Whether you want your robot to terrify your enemies with a demonic synthetic voice, you just need a pocket boom box on the go, or you want to a miniature guitar amp, a simple LM386 amplifier can crank up those signals loud enough to play through any speaker.

How To: Make a Hydrogen Fireball from Aluminum Foil and Toilet Bowl Cleaner

Balloons are fun, but the helium ones are always more entertaining. So today, we're going to learn how to make hydrogen gas by combining toilet bowl cleaner with aluminum foil. With hydrogen, you get the same lighter-than-air properties of helium, plus it will explode! Historically, this has proven disastrous, but for our tiny-scale experiments, it will be safe and fun!

How To: Make Homemade Smoke Flares with Fuses

Here's a technique I used to whip up a batch of super cheap and easy to make smoke flares! WARNING: Ignition of an incendiary or explosive material may not be legal in your area, so check local laws before attempting. Use of this video content is at your own risk.

How To: Make a Mini Flamethrower, Exploding Fireball, & Flint Bomb Sparkler with Disposable Lighters

Whether you've got an itch for a mini-flamethrower, a shower of burning sparks, or a exploding ball of flames, these little fireworks-producing lighters may be the answer to your pyrotechnic cravings!

How To: Build Your Own Projection Microscope with a Syringe, Laser Pointer, and Drop of Water

Have you ever wondered what sort of microscopic critters are floating around in your water? Well, you can find out with just a few bucks worth of materials and a laser pointer. Really. That's all it takes to build your very own homemade laser projection microscope, aka a water drop projector.

How To: Trigger Anything from Anywhere with Just a Phone Call

Smartphones are crazy awesome. You can do your banking, track your children, find directions, and even pretend to have a mustache. The only thing that these personal supercomputers are missing is physical interaction with the environment.

News: Scientists Create World's Smallest Snowman—He's Just 0.00012 Inches Tall

Frosty the Snowman is a fairy tale they say, but this microscopic snowman is very real and just broke the record for the world's smallest snowman. (Though, it's not Guinness-official yet.)

How To: 10 Things to Do at a Birthday Party with Liquid Nitrogen

If you've got a birthday party to plan for a young budding scientist coming up, a little nitrogen should do the trick. In this project, I'll show you 10 "super cool" tricks with liquid nitrogen that you could try, but probably shouldn't!

How To: Need a Hot Plate? Use an Iron as a Quick (And Free) DIY Alternative

If you're the kind of person who frequently does science experiments at home, you probably have a hot plate. But if you're more of an occasional amateur scientist (or just don't want to buy one), it's much easier to hack your own.

How To: Create Practically Anything, Part 1: Fritzing Circuit Boards

Making your own circuit boards can be a daunting challenge. You have to design a schematic, test it on a breadboard, design the board layout, and then after all of that, you still have to print and etch a board!

How To: Create Your Own Cast and Oogoo to Give Your DIY Gadgets the Shape You Want

I think it's fair to say that every maker yearns for a 3D printer. You can replace circuit board connectors, fix your glasses, create ski grips, and make whole machines out of printed plastic parts—even a 3D printer. But without a 3D printer on hand, you can always resort to Sugru.

Create Tomorrow's Fuel Today: Split Hydrogen and Oxygen from Water with Pencils and a Battery

Science-fiction writer Jules Verne predicted many scientific breakthroughs, including the moon landing, tasers, and nuclear submarines. In his 1874 book The Mysterious Island, Verne writes:

News: Pure Silicone Casting

For those of you who enjoyed the oogoo tutorial we did, this tutorial from instructables shows you how to make molds from 100% silicone gel for casting resin! I wonder if you could also cast other silicone shapes using a silicone mold...

10th Time's the Charm: Success and Failures of Making a Jam Jar Jet Engine

I finally got around to trying out this jam jar jet project. The most successful and longest lasting pulse was somehow the only one I did not record. You can imagine how frustrating that probably was, though my tenth and final attempt was nearly as satisfying. But even the failures were fun to watch, especially the blue flame floating, almost dancing, around the jar. I especially liked the small foghorn sound that my first failed attempt produced.

How To: Turn Water into Fuel by Building This DIY Oxyhydrogen Generator

Here's how to build a sexy looking water-fuel generator that will convert your tap water into an extremely powerful, clean burning gas!

DIY Polygraph Machine: Detect Lies with Tin Foil, Wire and Arduino

Lying is awesome. From a very young age, children learn that flat out denying the truth gets you out of trouble and helps keep you calm in the face of horror. But what happens when you just have to know if someone, say, used your toothbrush? You could ask them to take an expensive and arduous polygraph test.

Bat Science: How Realistic Are Batman's Gadgets in Dark Knight Rises?

One of the best things about Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is how realistic he makes the caped crusader feel. Unlike the Joel Schumacher or even the Tim Burton versions, Nolan's world seems grounded in some level of scientific fact. But just how close is science to actually being able to replicate some of the Dark Knight's gadgetry?

How To: Make "Fight Club" Soap Out of Bacon & Drain Cleaner

To make soap, you need fat, and if you've seen Fight Club, you're probably well aware of where soapmaker Tyler Durden got his fat from. Liposuction clinics. If you're not willing to go that far for a perfect bar of homemade soap, you can just use some drain cleaner and America's favorite food instead—bacon!

How To: Make Solid Rocket Fuel at Home with Old Newspapers

Old newspapers come in handy for many different uses around the house, from birdcage liners to shipping cushioning and even a little fish cooking. But for backyard rocket scientists like Markus Bindhammer, they're more suitable as an ingredient for rocket propellant.

How To: Make Dry Ice at Home Using a CO2 Fire Extinguisher

Here's how to make dry-ice at home, or wherever you feel like it! All you need is a pillow case, and a CO2 fire extinguisher.

How To: Use a Funnel and Butane Torch to Make a Huge Corn-Flour Fireball

One of the coolest things about chemical reactions is that they can be so unexpected. I mean, who would think you can make water explode?

How To: Shoot Fire from a Water Bottle Using Rubbing Alcohol and a Match

You've made a bottle rocket (or ten) and a sparkler bomb, and now you want to put those empty plastic bottles to a new pyromaniacal use. With a little rubbing alcohol and a match, this video by io9's Esther Inglis-Arkell will show you how to make your own homemade rocket booster in a bottle.

How To: Make a "Joule Thief" and Create Zombie Batteries for More Power After Death

Just about every household gadget we own runs on 1.5 volt batteries of one size or another. Wouldn't it be great if you could reuse all of those dead AA, AAA, and D batteries after they've passed on? It turns out you can make a simple circuit called a "Joule Thief" to reanimate the undead flesh of your deceased batteries and create a zombie battery.

How To: Make Your Own "TV-B-Gone" to Silence All Televisions That Oppose You

Whether you're in an airport, restaurant or waiting room, the insidious grip of televisions on human life is omnipresent. Sometimes it's nice to talk to other human beings while looking at them directly—actually hearing what they have to say.

Improvised Handheld Fireworks: How to Make Homemade Sparklers

The big fireworks day is almost here, but most of you are limited in what you can do when it comes to celebrating the Fourth of July with a bang. Unless you live in a dry area prone to wildfires, one type of fireworks you can probably still legally buy are sparklers.

How To: Make a Fake, Pirate-Worthy Gold Bar on the Cheap

I loved the Gold Rush unit back in third grade. We went up to the American River and panned for gold, and my panning skills balled above all. I got like three tiny pellets. Of course, it was all fool's gold, aka pyrite, but it was still pretty legit. And this was before wearing gold chains was cool—or not.

How To: Turn Ordinary Water into Explosive Gas That Goes KABOOM!

Maybe not water per-se, but with this simple technique you can turn one of the most abundant materials on earth into a highly explosive gas.

How To: DIY Solar-Powered, RC Lawn Mower: Cut Your Grass Without Ever Leaving the Couch!

One of the most annoying things about summer is mowing the lawn. Depending on how big your yard is, it can mean spending hours out in the hot sun while you could be doing something a lot more fun like watching the Olympics or making giant soap bubbles. Reclaim your summer with this remote control lawn mower that does all the hard work for you.

How To: Make Super Fizzy Carbonated Beverages at Home with Dry Ice

Want to make your own soda or maybe just bring a dull one back to life? Homemade sodas don't always live up to the store bought ones because they can taste flat by comparison. This quick and easy method makes super fizzy drinks with only four ingredients. Because putting dry ice in a sealed bottle would effectively turn it into a bomb, you'll need to make a safety valve for the bottle.