The Latest on Mad Science: Page 3

Ever wonder how all of those tiny chips and components can fit inside your laptop or smartphone? If you tried to squeeze them in there yourself, your laptop would quickly become too heavy for your lap, and your mobile phone would need wheels to stay mobile.

Thank you to everyone who entered the photo contest for a chance to win a cool lucid dreaming goggles kit from Mad Science. This month's winner was Cerek, who submitted this great camera shutter release project photo:

Pranks are fun, but finding a way to maximize the affect of a prank can be tricky. Toilet papering the whole campus or repainting all of the parking spaces slightly smaller can take a long time and a lot of resources. A better plan of attack is to booby trap the choke points where your victims are forced to pass through. Think like a guerrilla. A dorm doorway is a good idea.

Recreating one of Will's mad science experiments, I made some potassium nitrate crystals. This was definitely the most fun part of my DIY smoke mix. I can't win the contest, but I'm just putting it up here for fun, since I liked the pictures so much.

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.

If you're like me, you were always jealous of the kids with rich parents who got to ride around in their own Power Wheels cars. Now that I am tall enough to sell my body and time, I find myself attaining childhood dreams like buying my own Power Wheels car. I would not have chosen the Barbie Jeep given the choice, but 40 bucks on Craigslist is an amazing deal.

Today's fancy cars come with all sorts of options, from power mirrors to working seat belts. Some of us condemned to live in the reality of capitalist recession have no car, or perhaps a very modest one. But your modest car can still have some cutting edge technology wedged into the trunk and dashboard if you know what you want and where to look for parts. Today, we make a parking sensor using a sonic range finder, just like in the vehicles our owners drive!

There is a secret world hidden just beneath the surface of every pond, lake, and stream. Those waters are filled with wails of hideous creates murdering other hideous creatures for food and sport. Beautiful animals like dragonflies and damselflies that you see in the light of day start their lives in this sparse spartan hellscape. Luckily, being giant mammals, we can pluck these creatures from the depths and look at all of their cool behaviors! All you need is a pond, net, and curiosity.

I would like to learn how to make lminol and ballistic gell if anybody can help I would apreciate it thanx, love Tim.

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.

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.

Since the invention of the mechanical clock, enclosure of the commons, and proletarianization of labor, the alarm clock has been the bane of our existence. While not actually evil, it does represent the constant and uncompromising glare of our owners shaking a patronizing finger at us, telling us to get to work so they can use our labor to grant themselves bonuses.

My name is Noah Hornberger. I'm a former Pixar artist (Wall-E, 2008) and Professor of Animation (DePaul University, Chicago), and I have recently invented a motion-activated musical toy called the Dub Cadet. One Substance TV blogger has called my light-up sphere that transforms motion into music, "Daft Punk [the electronic music duo] meets Simon [the handheld toy] in a ball."

Creating any object you want is as simple as point and click if you have a 3D printer at home. If you don't have one handy, there are a few companies that offer printing services online. But to help services realize your design in extruded plastic, you have to make a 3D computer model for the printing machine. For beginners, the free Google SketchUp application is the best choice of software. Using only a few tool bar buttons and a scroll wheel computer mouse, you can model literally any object...

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!

I made this taser using a disposable camera and duct tape! In the photograph, the taser is shocking a steel bookshelf.

Graffiti is a great way of getting your message out to the masses. The earliest known graffiti dates back to 30,000 years ago and used the traditional apply-paint-to-wall technique. Though our paint now comes in cans and not from scavenged berries, the actual graffiti process hasn't really evolved from those first cave paintings.

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.

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!

Hobby rockets are tons of fun. Vicarious astronaut adventures abound with every launch. What if you want to be closer to the action though? What if you want to feel what it's like to be in a rocket at takeoff? With the discovery of tiny keychain cameras, we have technology small and cheap enough to fit inside a model rocket!

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.

Mad Science has entered the automatic pet feeder project as an instructable in the Make It Real challenge. Nine of the winners will receive their own 3D printer! If you are now imagining all the cool stuff we could do for Mad Science with a 3D printer, please share your ideas and vote for the entry here.

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...

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.

Mike received a tiny medical pill-camera from a relative who had recently undergone treatment. The most surprising part apart from the utter grossness is that the camera transmits electrical signals straight through the human body to skin electrodes with no radio at all! Check out the video to see the camera and Mike's impressive mastery of the oscilloscope.

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.

Your favorite device is running low on juice and needs a couple new AA batteries—and with a quickness. You run to the store and grab the first pack of AAs you see. But should you? There's tons of options available, so which make and model gives you the most power per dollar?

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.

Spring has sprung, which means it's time to plant all those delicious vegetables and lucrative cash crops. If you are like me, every year you meticulously plan every aspect of your garden before dutifully neglecting it all summer. I decided enough was enough and built this simple automatic watering system.

hey u guys there i just wanted to ask about the wireless transmitter and receiver, how to make any device wireless...please do tell me

When I was attending college, my friends had a phantom thief in their dormitory. Almost every night, a different item of food would go missing, never to be seen again. There was constant speculation as to whom the thief was and how to catch them. Security cameras were deemed too invasive, but none could think of another method of surveillance... until today.

What happens when you add a few wires and a microcontroller to your door buzzer? You can let yourself into your building from the outside!

Bikes are a great form of transportation. They use human energy more efficiently than any other machine. You can keep it in your closet or hallway. You can even take it on the train in a pinch. However, this portability is also the bike's biggest draw back. If you own a bike in the city, chances are it will be stolen. Locks barely deter thieves armed with bolt cutters and crowbars. Throw the bike thieves for a loop and make a tilt-sensitive alarm. It will hopefully startle your bike's assailant...

House plants are a refreshing reminder of the rich biosphere teaming with life just outside of our hermetically sealed human dens. They calm us and clean our air. But what would you do if you came across a glowing green flower on your dinner table? I would be startled, but not shaken.

This video is by Adrian McLaughlin, aka plasticraincoat1 on YouTube, who shows us one of the most magnificent examples of explosive polymerization ever. In the video, what appears to be about 1/2 tsp of p-nitroaniline (which is short for para-nitroaniline, which is also referred to as 4-nitroaniline) is treated with a few drops of concentrated sulfuric acid, in a ceramic dish, over a Bunsen burner flame.

Rockets are lots of fun when you are launching them. However, finding them can be an arduous if not maddening task. Fancy space rockets have lots of tracking equipment to make touchdowns as simple as pie. Today, we look at embedding LEDs into your hobby rocket for easy night flight fun!

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.

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.