Hot Mad Science Posts

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: 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.

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 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!

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: 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.

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 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.

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: 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.

Supercool Science Trick: How to Turn Water into Ice on Command

This is an awesome little science trick that has to be seen to be believed. Simply by emptying a bottle of "supercooled" water into a glass, you can watch it turn into ice right as your pour! It's no magic trick or chemical craziness—it's normal water and you can try it yourself right in your own home.

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: 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: 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: 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.

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: 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: 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!

DIY Hydrogen Fuel Cell: How to Create the Fuel of the Future at Home

As some of you Mad Science readers will remember, we recently covered the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis. Passing a current through water can rend it apart, but we can also recombine that oxygen and hydrogen to make electricity! This is the principle behind those vehicles run by hydrogen fuel cell engines.

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: 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.

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: Brain Hacking and Thought-Controlled Quadcopters: The Good and Bad Future of Mind-Reading Devices

Until recently, brainwave-reading devices have pretty much only existed in science fiction. Sure, electroencephalography (EEG), the technology that powers these devices, has been used in medicine and psychiatry since the late 1800s, but diagnosing people's brains and reading their minds are two totally different things. The first EEG headsets available to the public were used mostly in gaming and even in fashion, but in the last few years, they've gotten a little more sophisticated.

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: Find Hidden Blood Splatter Stains on Your Walls with This Infrared Photography Hack

I'm sorry to say, but Dexter Morgan hasn't thought of everything. Just because he's the best blood splatter analyst in the Miami metro area, doesn't mean he can't be taught a thing or two about blood. In fact, I'm sure this is something he'd be glad to know. Spotting a bloodstain is pretty easy at a crime scene, especially when there was no attempt to cover it up. When the scene has been wiped clean, there are still ways for forensic investigators to detect washed away blood, like using a rea...

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!

Science Gives You Super Powers: How to Shoot Fireballs from Your Hands

Everyone dreams of having super powers. Flying, invisibility, and x-ray vision are popular, but my favorite is fire power! I've always wanted to be Wheeler from the Captain Planet kids show, and now I can with these handheld fireballs of awesomeness. The fireballs burn at a low temperature, so they are safe to hold in your hand and throw (shoot) at imaginary enemies.

DIY Solar Power: Make Your Own Diode-Based Solar Panels and Capture the Sun's Energy!

Solar panels are an amazing invention. Catching energy from the Sun before it even enters Earth's food chain, photovoltaics are like an all-natural nuclear power plant. Unfortunately, the constituted parts of a solar panel are rare, valuable, and subject to the coercive forces of market competition.

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: 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.

DIY Lab Equipment: How to Etch Your Own Circuit Boards Using a Laser Printer

Homemade circuits are amazing. You can build any kind of circuit on a simple perfboard, as we have seen in previous projects. However, some projects require very tiny circuit boards. We could special order some boards from a printed circuit board (PCB) factory, but that will most likely involve a high price per board and a few thousand miles of delivery service to pay for.

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: 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.

Get Into the Kit Business: How to Build and Sell Your Own Arduino Shields

The DIY industry is booming, despite the desperate blackmailing of society by finance capitalists. Companies like Adafruit and Makerbot are grossing well over a million dollars a year, and Evil Mad Science Laboratories just recently dedicated themselves to running a full-time kit business. Making kits is fun, but starting a business can be scary. If you already enjoy making gadgets and want to take the plunge into selling your own kits online, this article is for you.

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: Light Up the Night Sky with Your Own Burning 'Cincinnati Fire Kite' That Flies by Itself

Not many people fly kites anymore. Most of us don't have the patience or attention span because, let's face it, we're used to smartphones and other gadgets that have games and apps galore to entertain us. Heck, you can even fly a kite on them if you really want.

DIY Scientists Beware: When NOT to Use Household Chemicals for Your Projects

The only thing better than successfully pulling off a new experiment is doing it with household materials. You get to laugh in conceit as professional scientists everywhere spend all their grant money on the same project you just accomplished with some under-the-sink chemicals! However, there are times when DIY gets dangerous. Some household chemicals are not pure enough to use and some are just pure dangerous. Let's take a look at two problems I have encountered in the course of mad sciencing.

How To: This DIY Double-Bladed 'Stun Sword' Shocks and Slices Simultaneously

When it comes to melee combat, two swords can definitely be better than one. Throw a stun gun on top of that and you've got a seriously terrifying weapon. That's exactly what YouTuber jonathanj9969 did with his homemade double-bladed stun sword.