Nikola Tesla was a genius. Any geek worth his salt knows this. He was also certifiably insane, which is probably why he was denied credit for much of his inventions. But most of you have probably heard of the Tesla Coil, that device TV shows are very fond of for its ability to produce some fantastic electric discharges. Well, a man by the name of Rob Flickenger has put the device to good use and made a gun out of it. That’s right, Rob’s device is a gun that shoots lighting rays; he calls it The Tesla Gun. There’s no thunder of course, because it’s not actual lightning, but man, that thing shoots some mean electric arcs and can be pointed at stuff. When it doesn’t find ground, it just kind of shoots stuff all over. The gun housing is made from melted down aluminum cans, which was poured into a mold made from a Nerf gun.
The final working Tesla Gun is a portable spark gap Tesla coil that is powered by an 18V drill battery. The electrical system is composed of the aforementioned drill battery along with a flyback transformer that steps the 18V to around 20,000V. A bank of capacitors stores the charge that is then used to strobe the coil itself. The primary and secondary coils are made of ABS plastic wrapped with copper wire, and are used to direct the charge outward through an aluminum toroid (the “barrel” of the gun).
We gotta say, Rob channels the mad scientist look quite well. And he’s done a good job of detailing a step by step of how he made this. So head on over to the links below and watch science in the making.
We’re not going to launch into a sales pitch about the iPhone’s camera. It’s nice, ok, but whatever. It’s nice enough to carry around in your pocket and happens to have a smartphone attached to it. So it stands to reason that you’re going to start looking for ways to use it in more situations than it was originally intended for. The Magnifi case lets you position your phone right over the eyepiece of almost any optical instrument, and lock it in place for easy photographing/recording. It has a detachable eyepiece adapter that locks onto the rest of the case through a “bayonet mount”, meaning a twist-to-lock mechanism that not only secures it in place, but makes it simple to upgrade later to different types of adapters should you need to. It’s not a full case in the sense that you won’t be toting your phone around in it; it’s more of a slide-in affair, with a safety latch to prevent the iPhone from sliding out.
Magnifi was designed to work with eyepieces that are 1in – 1.5in in diameter (25mm – 38mm). If your eyepiece has large eye seals, they must be removable. In order to align you phone’s camera with the eyepiece, Magnifi must be able to slide down over the eyepiece at least 1in (25mm) without obstruction.
Currently a fully funded project on Kickstarter, Magnifi is $60 with an eventual retail price of $80.
We’re all sad that the shuttle program is over. Space exploration is just no longer the cool thing it was; government dollars for NASA have been dwindling for years. This shifting of priorities is due to the fact that we’re no longer “at war” with the USSR. The cold war meant that each power had to constantly outdo the other and the race into space was as good a way as any to try and one-up your adversary. But all that’s a distant past. So, to relive some of the memories, maybe you could watch the above video. It’s a fascinating 400 second journey of a couple of cameras strapped to the side of the booster rockets on Atlantis and Endeavour. They reach speeds of 3,000pmh and 41 miles of height before noisily re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the ocean. It’s all caught in multiple angles and is well worth the watch.
“Ferrofluids are colloidal liquids made of nanoscale ferromagnetic, or ferrimagnetic, particles suspended in a carrier fluid (usually an organic solvent or water). Each tiny particle is thoroughly coated with a surfactant to inhibit clumping.” You’ve probably seen it before in impressive videos of it being manipulated by moving magnets around, looking somewhat like an alien substance. It’s an impressive effect and it’s one that you can now reproduce at will on your desk through this Kickstarter project. Coming in two sizes called Ferrite and Ferro, the desk toys are made from a high quality glass tube and an aluminum base. The larger vessel Ferrite stands 8.5″ tall with a 5″ diameter base. The smaller vessel Ferro is 4.25″ tall and 2″ in diameter. You’re provided with a neodymium stylus so you can play around with the material.
Currently 30% funded, $100 will get you the Ferro while $125 the Ferrite. $175 will get you both.
This is a contraption whose sole purpose is to suspend a magnet cube in midair. But if you’re anything like us, you don’t need any more justification to start wanting this. Think of this item as a cross between a toy, a puzzle and a work of art. It’s a puzzle because you’ll be sure to have some fun assembling the 20 laser-cut pieces of MDF. It’s a toy because, let’s face it, it’s more fun than assembling IKEA furniture so the process itself… screw it, alright, it’s not a toy. But it is somewhat of a work of art in that if you like science at all, you can keep this on display to show the world just how much of a geek you are.
Place the cube magnet in between the specially-cast bismuth cones, and let the forces fight. See, gravity will be pulling the magnet cube down, but the super powerful magnet on top of the sculpture will be pulling the magnet cube up. Slowly turn the wheel of your DIY Magnetic Levitating Sculpture Kit (which adjusts the powerful magnet’s distance from the cube). Once you get the forces balanced (so to speak), the magnet cube will hover in mid air!
Insane Clown Posse might have had a point all along. Check out the above video and have fun picking up your jaw off the floor. It shows what the science types are calling quantum levitation, and is allegedly taking place in Tel Aviv, at an ASTC (Association of Science and Technology Centers) event. Now folks, this stuff is nothing new. It involves superconducting magnets, liquid nitrogen and supposedly an effect called flux pinning. It’s now apparently being called quantum levitation because frankly, it’s attention grabbing. But to be honest, no one is really thinking about the science behind this. It’s the video, guys. Just check out the video. And we know what you’re thinking.
Hoverboards.
Right?
Well, we’re not quite there yet but holy crap this looks amazing.
Oh those scientists, always looking out for mankind. Now researchers at the University of California, Davis, have come up with a self-cleansing cloth. They’ve taken regular old cotton and covered it with a new compound called 2-anthraquinone carboxylic acid, or 2-AQC. When exposed to light, 2-ACQ releases chemicals (hydroxyl radicals and hydrogen peroxide) that harm bacteria and break down other organic compounds. More importantly, perhaps, is that 2-ACQ has been shown to bond strongly to cellulose and doesn’t simply wash off like other self-cleaning products. Not that you’d want to wash them. Because we all know what we’re going to be doing with this stuff. And that’s not washing the heck out of it. Just to see…
Better yet, the fabric may not be that far away from hitting the market. Although still at the research phase and “although 2-AQC is more expensive than other compounds, the researchers say that cheaper equivalents are available.”
I know for a lot of people, Monday morning isn’t exactly the time when their brain is functioning at full capacity. But I thought this video demonstrating Eddy currents was certainly worth sharing. The demonstrator is simply dropping a small stack of neodymium magnets down a thick-walled section of copper pipe. And even though the magnets aren’t attracted to the pipe, their descent is still slowed dramatically on the way down. Either that, or this is a brilliant hoax, and that pipe is actually a mile long.
And since I’m one of those persons whose brain doesn’t fully kick in until late Tuesday, I’m including Wikipedia’s description of Eddy currents if you’re curious as to what’s supposedly going on here:
Eddy currents (also called Foucault currents[1]) are currents induced in conductors, when a conductor is exposed to a changing magnetic field due to relative motion of the field source and conductor; or due to variations of the field with time. This can cause a circulating flow of electrons, or a current, within the body of the conductor. These circulating eddies of current have inductance and thus induce magnetic fields. These fields can cause repulsive, attractive,[2] propulsion and drag effects.
After a visually impaired student signed up for one of professor David Hurd’s introductory astronomy courses at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, he started creating tactile astronomy tools so they could partly experience what celestial objects were like. And his latest effort, a new book called Getting A Feel For Lunar Craters, allows the blind and visually impaired to experience the surface of the Earth’s moon with tactile diagrams and braille descriptions that lets readers feel the various craters, crags and other landmarks that dot its surface.
The 17 page book was created by David with assistance from the NASA Lunar Science Institute, and as far as I can tell is available for free from NASA’s website, though you’ll have to wait for the second reprinting of the book which will be ready in a couple of months. In the meantime though, text-only and audio file versions of the book can be downloaded from their site, if you’re curious.
Related Tags: DIY, guns, Science
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By David Ponce
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