Hot Mad Science Posts
Backwards Geocaching: How to Make a Reverse Geocache Box
If you've never heard of geocaching, it's kind of a grown-up treasure hunt you play everywhere in the world. GPS coordinates are given as clues and the players must find the cache box. There is usually a log book to write your name and a small toy or present to collect.
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.
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: 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!
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: 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: Forget Keys—Use a Secret Knock to Open Your Locked Boxes
There is something special about a secret knock. It gets you into secret super villain meetings and is a surefire way to test for rotating bookcase passages. Secret knocks usually work with an intimidating drug lord and for policeman listening at the door for the correct pattern of raps.
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: 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!
How To: Create a PCB Etchant That Automatically Improves After Each Use
Etching your own circuit boards is tons of fun, but etching requires strong chemicals to dissolve the copper plating on blank circuit boards. The normal ferric chloride solution works well, but can be expensive and leaves permanent stains. Luckily, we can whip up our own etchant at home with everyday chemicals! Better yet, our new etchant will turn an eerie green color rather than the dull brown of ferric chloride.
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!
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: 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: 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: Make a Lethal Traveling Arc of Electricity with a MOT-Powered Jacob's Ladder
With the microwave oven transformer (M.O.T.) salvaged in a previous project, a simple electrical circuit can be rigged to get high voltage arcs to fly outward and upward along a "V" shaped spark gap.
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.
How To: DIY Flanagan Neurophone Lets You 'Hear' Sounds Through Your Skin
In 1958, Patrick Flanagan invented the Neurophone, a device patented in 1962 that allows radio signals to be picked up by the human nervous system. The skin is the organ that receives the signal, converting it into a modulated molecular vibration, which the brain interprets into sound. Basically, it gives one the ability to 'hear' through the skin, making it sound like the audio you're hearing is actually in your head. It's kind of like having headphones in your brain. The only problem was th...
How To: Design Your Own Custom Arduino Board Microcontroller
Microcontrollers are great. You can do anything from water your garden to catch wildlife trash diggers in the act—and on the cheap. I prefer to use the Arduino microcontroller because of the large and helpful community built around the website. Though it is my favorite, there are some drawbacks to using an Arduino board in every project. It gets expensive, the board can take up too much space, and the rat's nest of breadboard wires are a pain to repair.
News: This Wooden DIY Cell Phone Is Way Cooler Than Any Shiny Smartphone
There's no denying the coolness of an iPhone. But what if you pulled a homemade wooden cell phone out of your pocket instead? You'd probably be the talk of the town. If you like that idea, then make it a reality by building your own cell phone!
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.
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: 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: Launch 1,500 Ping Pong Balls into the Air with a Homemade Liquid Nitrogen Bomb
You can do a lot with liquid nitrogen, including freeze and shatter gummy bears, make homemade Dippin' Dots, and scare the crap out of your friends by dipping your hand in it! If you can't get your hands on any, you can even make it yourself. Or, if you want to try something a little more destructive, you can use it to make an explosion and send 1,500 ping pong balls flying.
How To: Automate Your Doorbell with Freaking Lasers
Doorbells are a great idea. They let you know when someone who's not a burglar is trying to enter your house, apartment, or squat. They eliminate the need for lots of noisy yelling and startling door pounding.
How To: How Hard Is It to Land on the Moon? New Space Game Gravitates Towards Space Physics
If you're like me, you were disappointed when NASA cut their human space flight program. No longer could children and adults in dead-end jobs dream of someday walking on the surface of the Moon or drinking floating globules of water through a straw. Homo sapiens as a species are still making it up there, but I will never be one of the chosen ones.
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.
Dragon Safari: The Incredible Metamorphosis from Nymph to Dragonfly
Last time we took a look at some of the creatures of the pond, including the dragonfly nymph. Today, we examine the all-grown-up dragonflies in the field you are used to seeing on summer days! Dragonflies are not dangerous, but the extra large ones can bite you something fierce if you handle them wrong.
DIY Lab Equipment: Make a Magnetically Controlled Cigar Box Stir Plate
If you've ever been inside of a real laboratory, you probably noticed how expensive the equipment is. You'd never be able to afford even just one of those ultra high-tech machines required to splice genes or split atoms. Even the lesser machines can be prohibitively costly, including a stir plate.
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: 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!
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: 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...
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.
How To: Build a Vacation Pet Feeder with a DIY Linear Actuator
If you are a pet owner, going on vacation can be stressful. Usually, you need a friend or neighbor to come over everyday and feed your pets. However, by enslaving robots you can keep your pet happy and enjoy a stress-free holiday.
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!
News: Freaking DIY Magma! Syracuse University Creates Recyclable Red-Hot Lava Flows
Believe it or not, it's possible to make your very own lava—if you have a furnace capable of heating up to 1,200 degrees Celsius, that is. Bob Wysocki and Jeff Karson started the Syracuse University Lava Project to study basaltic lava and give students a hands-on way (hypothetically, of course) to learn about it. Oh, and they also want to use it for art projects. Sign me up for that class! It all starts with 1.1 billion-year-old basalt gravel, which apparently anyone can buy. They put the gra...
News: Potassium Chlorate—How Pyromaniacal Mad Scientists Take Care of Cockroaches and Pesky Gummy Bears
Pyromania is definitely nothing new on WonderHowTo. From flamethrowers and hydrogen fireballs, to flame-making pistons and wine corks, to simply burning steel wool fireworks and DIY smoke mix, we've covered it all. But when pyromaniacal mad scientists feel the need to release some tension in the lab, gummy bears and cockroaches become the victims of euphoric oxidation by way of molten potassium chlorate. A recent video by famous YouTube chemist NurdRage shows one of mankind's most despised cr...
Elementary Sputnik Satellites: How to Make Trash Bag Hot Air Balloons
Sputnik was the very first man-made object to be sent into space. Though it was a truly epic accomplishment, all this Soviet sky surfer actually did was transmit a constant beeping noise back to the surface.
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: Melt Metal with a Modified Microwave Oven Transformer
In a previous project, I showed how to build an electrical Jacob's ladder using an old microwave oven transformer (MOT). In this project, I modified the secondary coil on the MOT, which converts it from a high voltage/low current device into a low voltage/high current metal melter!