A wooden table with walnut squares and a maple grid. The table has a large barrel-shaped curve on one end and the other is a representation of a wormhole with what look like two stretched cones connected through a narrow cylinder. The wooden grid looks stretch to follow the curvature of spacetime.

Wormhole Coffee Table Takes Woodworking To Another Dimension

January 20, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 20 Comments

While some people are happy with a simple coffee table to hold their snacks while watching Star Trek reruns, others want their furniture to go where no furniture has gone before. [Olivier Gomis] has definitely satisfied this need with his Wormhole Coffee Table. [YouTube]

The complicated shape and curvature of a (3D representation of a) wormhole isn’t easy to create, but [Gomis] managed to carve one without the aid of a CNC or 3D printer. Starting with walnut planks and maple veneer laminated together, he created a grid stackup to replicate the common representation of spacetime as a 2D grid. Using various arrangements of these grids, he built up the central section of the wormhole which looked like a low poly vase before he put it on the lathe for turning.

The lathe work on this build is simultaneously impressive and terrifying. Turning down the central portion of the wormhole required working between two large spinning squares of walnut, which [Gomis] admits was “scary.” Multiple custom jigs were required to keep parts flat and deal with the extreme curvature of the inside of the wormhole’s opening. If that weren’t enough, if you look down the wormhole, he has installed a set of LED lights that show the spacetime grid continuing on to parts unknown.

If you’d like to see another impressive wormhole, check out this Amazing STARGᐰTE With DHD And Infinity Mirror Wormhole.

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You Can Make Ferrofluid On The Cheap With VHS Tapes

December 22, 2022 by Lewin Day 34 Comments

Ferrofluid is a wonderous substance. It’s a liquid goop that responds to magnetic fields in exciting and interesting ways. It’s actually possible to make it yourself, and it’s cheap, too! The key is to get yourself some old VHS tapes.

The only fitting end for a copy of *Speed II.*

The trick is to separate the ferric oxide from the plastic tape inside the VHS cassette. Step one is naturally to smash open a cassette, and pull out the plastic tape from inside. The tape can then be dunked in acetone to dissolve the plastic, leaving behind the ferric oxide that once stored your cherished copy of Heat. A magnet is an easy way to collect the ferric oxide, which should then be left to dry. The powdery substance can then be blended in a ratio of 1 mL of ferric oxide to 0.333 mL of cooking oil. Poor mixing can be improved by adding a droplet of water mixed with dish detergent. You should end up with a brownish sludge that acts as a rudimentary ferrofluid.

It’s a neat bit of home science. As with most such activities, it bears noting the safety risks. Don’t leave your acetone uncovered to form a nasty flammable vapor, and keep yourself keenly aware of any fire or ignition risks. Overall though, it’s a fairly straightforward process. While the resulting material isn’t necessarily lab grade, you could potentially use it to build your own ferrofluid display!

Get Clear Insights Into Cloudy Water With The Open Colorimeter

October 24, 2022 by Abe Connelly 4 Comments

A basic scientific tool for chemistry and biology is a colorimeter device used to measure which wavelengths of light a particular sample solution absorbs. Some applications of colorimeters are measuring pH or chlorine levels, measuring pollutants, such as oil or pesticides, and, in some cases, can even be used to measure RNA/DNA concentrations. Even most washing machines today have a specialized colorimeter sensor, of sorts, to measure turbidity (cloudiness) to provide feedback on the cleaning process. To help in building your home scientific lab, [IORodeo] has released an Open Colorimeter.

The Open Colorimeter is a self-contained device that accepts cuvettes filled with liquids for testing. The basic structure is an LED mounted onto a board that shines through the cuvette filled with a sample that is then measured at the other end by a TSL2591 color sensor. The Open Colorimeter has separate specialized LED boards for a range of wavelengths from 470nm to 630nm and incorporates a PyBadge that serves as the main microcontroller, as well as display and input.

[IORodeo] has done extensive documentation on the assembly, usage, and testing of the device. They have also provided protocols for the measurement of Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrite, and Phosphates in addition to providing resources for absorption profiles of many other substances. All files relating to the 3D enclosure, firmware source code, schematics and Gerbers are provided under an open source hardware compatible license. For those not wanting to build it themselves, [IORodeo] is offering them for sale.

This isn’t the first time we’ve featured colorimeters, with some building a DIY version and others using it in a Tricorder project. The Open Colorimeter is a nice addition to this list and is ready for hacking and extending!

Self-Driving Laboratories Do Research On Autopilot

September 29, 2022 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

Scientific research is a messy business. The road to learning new things and making discoveries is paved with hard labor, tough thinking, and plenty of dead ends. It’s a time-consuming, expensive endeavor, and for every success, there are thousands upon thousands of failures.

It’s a process so inefficient, you would think someone would have automated it already. The concept of the self-driving laboratory aims to do exactly that, and could revolutionize materials research in particular.

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IGY: The Year We All Got Along

September 20, 2022 by Al Williams 24 Comments

If you are a Steely Dan fan, you might know the Donald Fagen song, “IGY.” In it, Fagen sings about a rosy future with high-speed undersea rail, solar power, giant computers making life better, and spandex jackets. Since that song was on the 1982 album Nightfly, it is already too old for some people to remember, but the title goes back even further: the International Geophysical Year which was actually a little longer than a year in 1957 and 1958. The year was a concerted effort by 67 countries to further mankind’s knowledge of the Earth. It was successful, and was big news in its day, although not much remembered now.

The real origin dates back to even earlier. In 1882 and 1932 there were International Polar Years dedicated to researching the polar regions of the Earth. In a way, it makes sense to do this. Why should 60 or more countries each mount difficult, dangerous, and expensive expeditions to such a hostile environment? However, instead of a third polar year, James Van Allen (who has a famous belt) and some other scientists felt that advances in many fields made it the right time to study geophysics. From the scientific point of view, the IGY coincided with the solar activity cycle maximum. But there were other forces at play, too.

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The Quiet Before The Storm?

August 27, 2022 by Elliot Williams 82 Comments

My wife and I are reading a book about physics in the early 1900s. It’s half history of science and half biography of some of the most famous physicists, and it’s good fun. But it got me thinking about the state of physics 120 years ago.

What we’d now call classical mechanics was fully settled for quite a while, and even the mysterious electricity and magnetism had been recently put to rest by Maxwell and Heaviside. It seemed like there was nothing left to explain for a while. And then all the doors broke wide open.

As much as I personally like Einstein’s relativity work, I’d say the most revolutionary change in perspective, and driver of the most research in the intervening century, was quantum mechanics. And how did it all start? In the strangest of ways – with Niels Bohr worrying about why hydrogen and helium gasses gave off particular colors when ionized, which lead to his model of the atom and the idea of energy in quantum packets. Or maybe it was De Broglie’s idea that electrons could behave like waves or magnets, from slit and cathode-ray experiments respectively, that lead to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Either way, the birth of the strangest and most profound physics revolution – quantum mechanics – came from answering some ridiculously simple and straightforward questions. Why does helium emit pink, and how do TVs work? (I know, they didn’t have TVs yet…) Nobody looking at these phenomena, apart or together, could have thought that answering them would have required a complete re-thinking of how we think about reality. And yet it did.

I can’t help but wonder if there are, in addition to the multi-bazillion dollar projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, some simpler phenomena out there that we should be asking “why?” about. Are we in a similar quiet before the storm? Or is it really true that the way to keep pushing back the boundaries of our ignorance is through these mega-projects?

Replace An AA Battery With Paper

August 8, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 54 Comments

Paper is an ubiquitous part of society; so much so that the incredible engineering behind it often goes unnoticed. That isn’t the case for [Robert], though, who has a deep appreciation for the material and all its many uses far beyond recording information. In this particular video, he recreates a method found by researchers to turn a piece of paper into a battery with equivalent performance to a AA-sized alkaline battery. (Video, embedded below the break.)

The process involves the creation of a few different types of ink, each of which can be made with relatively common materials such as shellac, ethanol, polyethylene glycol, and graphite. Each of these materials are mixed in different proportions to create the inks. Once the cathode ink and anode ink are made, a third ink is needed called a current collector ink which functions essentially as a wire. The paper is dipped into a salt solution and then allowed to dry, given a partial waterproof coating, and when it is needed it can be activated by wetting it which allows the ion flow of the battery to happen.

The chemistry of this battery makes a lot of sense once you see it in action, and the battery production method also has a perk of having a long shelf life as long as the batteries stay dry. They also don’t damage the environment as much as non-rechargable alkaline cells do, at least unless you want to go to some extreme measures to reuse them.

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