Working Models of Science

Finally, Jell-O shots hit Japan. You would think the land of pop, sickly sweet, and incredibly creative commercialization of endless innovative products would have long ago begun serving an alcoholic drink that is A) candy colored B) candy tasting and C) slides right down the ...more

You're probably already impressed at some of the photos amateur astrophotographers can capture with their 16-megapixel digital cameras. I know I am. That's why I'm beefing up my camera skills, so I can also take some amazing pictures of our skies above. But if you can take pho ...more

This article will show you how to lift a Chevy Venture van using a floor jack and jack stands. This procedure may work on other vehicle types and models, such as cars and trucks. The key is to use the proper sized heavy duty floor jacks and jack stands to lift your vehicle, a ...more

Here is our entry for the Greek building contest. It is a model of the theater at Epidaurus. Here are our favorite images and descriptions out of those we used to build it: 1 2 3 4 And here are just a few screenshots. (I promised myself not to get too carried away with signs ...more

In my early life I was deeply impacted by the work of physician and psychoanalyst John C. Lilly. I still have my dog-eared copies of The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1968). Lilly's work, with dolphins and the developm ...more

Hardware hacks are something I feel we don't get enough of at Null Byte, so today I figured I would introduce a fun one. I've always been a curious hardware hacker. Taking things apart and learning how their internals work has always been a part of my nature. Quite some years ...more

Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play with us on our free server. Every once in a while you've got to challenge yourself and there's certainly no better time to do so than the week of Minecon. For this week's workshop we'll be rebuilding t ...more

It's a hell of a lot easier to make money selling an indie game now than it was four years ago. But it's still a rough game. Blitz Game Studios is a large UK developer producing everything from casual iOS games to Dead to Rights: Retribution. In 2008, they started a division ...more

Many gamers see the film industry as the premier model that video games should follow, and it's no surprise. Movies are seen as the most legitimate and profitable of all artistic visual mediums, which is certainly qualities practitioners of any new medium would desire. Big bud ...more

With Microsoft's release of the Kinect SDK, things seem to have slowed down a bit in the world of Kinect development. Have developers exhausted the uses of Kinect already? No way! Four researchers at Cornell University have created an AI-based system on the Kinect that can rec ...more

After stumbling across an interesting article by Hanne Blank—(apparent) hobbyist chef and widely known activist on the issues of weight, bisexuality, and sexuality—I've become even more fascinated by kitchen shortcuts. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold's recently released M ...more

Sounds like an anomaly, right? When I was a kid folding frogs, my mother gave me origami paper that was most certainly dry. But the works below by Vietnamese-American artist Giang Dinh were folded with one *wet* piece of paper. It's a technique called "Wet-Folding", invented b ...more

Psychology Today's Elizabeth Svoboda presents an interesting argument on the merits of no holds barred truth telling versus the social sensitivity involved in telling little white lies. Svoboda poses that while truth tellers may rest easy at night, brutal honesty can have nega ...more

Henry Goodelman we commend you, sir. You have stunned and baffled us ... more than any of the other 1000+ submitters to the Jackass 3D Prank Contest. How could someone submit something so outrageous that we'd make special mention of it as a NON-WINNER? Well, Henry suggests... ...more

Henry Goodelman we commend you, sir. You have stunned and baffled us ... more than any of the other 1000+ submitters to the Jackass 3D Prank Contest. How could someone submit something so outrageous that we'd make special mention of it as a NON-WINNER? Well, Henry suggests... ...more

Texas based artist Shawn Smith brings the digital world to reality with his woodcut pixelated sculptures. The combination of a traditional material (wood) with a contemporary concept results in surprisingly fresh work. Plus, the craftsmanship appears to be impeccable. Check ou ...more

R/C car manufacturer Losi just recently released the LOSI 1/10 TEN-T TRUGGY RTR, which is apparently the world's most advanced radio controlled car. The Ten-T is 18 inches long and 6.2 pounds, and operates like a real race car (but at 1/10 of the size). Check out these specs ...more

Wouldn't it be nice to just sit at your buddy's house, plug into his network, and see exactly what he's doing? What if it was as easy as that? What makes packet sniffers like Wireshark such potent tools is that a majority of local area networks (LANs) are based on the shared E ...more

The first item of business is that our very own William Finucane of Mad Science has written an article explaining exactly how the 3D printing process works, which may help some of you to better conceptualize how your builds will come to life in the 3D world! You can find his ...more

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 w ...more

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 in ...more

In my Wireshark article, we talked a little bit about packet sniffing, but we focused more on the underlying protocols and models. Now, I'd like to dive right back into Wireshark and start stealing packets. The filtering capabilities here are very comprehensive. You can filte ...more

Around the world, X-People (yes... there are X-Women, too) are under attack from an intolerant sapiencentric ruling class. Integration without equality is a farce. Autonomy is denied outright. Human prejudice cannot abide a mutant state. Human fear, born to hate, imposes itsel ...more

Download the Software Go to the Antiprism downloads page. Download and install Antiprism 0.20. Run the Programs You need a method of running programs on the command line. In Windows, that could be a DOS box, on other systems a terminal emulator (e.g. xterm). Start this up. ...more

Locked out of your car and need to break in ASAP? Unlace a shoelace from one of your shoes and you've got yourself the only tool you need to open your car door from the outside. Don't Miss: 6 Easy DIY Ways to Open Your Car Door Without a Key Simply make a slipknot in the mid ...more

With the purchase of my latest computer, installing Linux turned into a nightmare from Hell. The graphics drivers are probably the biggest issue that anyone with a newer computer will run into when installing Linux. AMD and NVIDIA are the dominant ones on the market, both of w ...more

Since the day of the Xbox 360 release, storage space for the device has been overpriced beyond belief. OEM 250GB HDD models still cost $110 USD! A 250GB hard drive should not destroy my wallet, Microsoft. Storage space, especially on HDDs, is cheap. You can buy a removable 2TB ...more

Video Introduction to Edit on a Dime. Hey there, Interwebs and welcome to Edit on a Dime, your community for reviews, tutorials and news in the world of free and low cost creative tools. The purpose of this World is to make your video, audio and images look professional withou ...more

These boxes are inspired by a comment from Imaatfal Avidya on a corkboard post on Platonic polyhedra from sonobe units. Imaatfal was commenting about how the cube and octahedron are related to each other. "There is something cool and special about the platonic solids—there is ...more

It's Monday, which means once again, it's time to highlight some of the most recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. I also thought we'd take a look at building a sliceform model of a hyperbolic paraboloid. Rachel Mansur put up two posts on her Modula ...more

Last post, the Sonobe unit was introduced as a way to use multiple copies of a simply folded piece of paper to make geometric objects. In this post, we are going to explore that concept further by making two more geometric models. The first is the truncated icosahedron, which ...more

It's Monday, which means once again, it's time to highlight some of the recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. I also thought that we'd try and create something known as an "Orderly Tangle" or "Polylink". This week we had a few submissions based off ...more

I recently came across this amazing MIT media lab site, Kit-of-No-Parts. Though not directly related to the content Cory has been posting, it is an interesting "craft" approach to technology/science. The site was created as documentation of a student's thesis work in the High- ...more

Whereas yesterday's segment of Making Art on Your iOS Device focused on the technical elements of drawing from life, today we enter the painterly realm of David Hockney and Jorge Colombo. The apps below can be categorized under "painting"—or more accurately, the digital creat ...more

This colorful image may look like a miniature set of model cars, foam buildings and painted grass, but it's nothing of the sort. It's a still photo from a time-lapse video that Stu Kennedy shot in his hometown of Lincoln, England. But it's not your ordinary time-lapse. Kennedy ...more

Sure, you go online to email and shop and do research. But have you ever been curious about how the internet actually works? Don't worry, you don't need a degree in computer science to get a handle on how your info gets from point A to point B. Learning the basics of the inter ...more

Artist Pery Burge uses water, paint and ink to create images that look like they might have been captured by the Hubble Telescope or under the super-zoom of a powerful microscope. "I use a Canon EOS 500D digital camera with EF100mm F2.8 macro lens and Speedlite 420EX flash, a ...more

Arvind Gupta is an Indian educator and inventor who makes whimsical, elegant toys from simple and inexpensive materials. His site has hundreds of free project tutorials, with simply outlined instructions in the categories of science, math, astronomy and more. Below, peruse the ...more

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has figured out a way to make an omelette inside the eggshell through a tiny, punctured hole. It works like this: Puncture the egg with a small hole (1-5 mm) Scramble the egg inside the shell, through that hole Plug the hole (maybe with egg) s ...more

Instructables user BrittLiv uses a moldable silicone called sugru to sculpt this awesome doorstop of South Park's miraculously indestructible Kenny McCormick. You Will Need: orange and black sugru flesh, white, brown and black paint, paint brush rubber floor mat, the thinner ...more

Chris Burden's latest piece is a portrait of L.A.'s hot mess of traffic, entitled Metropolis II. The artist has constructed a miniature highway system, complete with 1,200 custom-designed cars, 18 lanes, 13 toy trains and tracks, and a landscape of buildings made with wood blo ...more

Math is unreasonably effective in describing the natural universe. Anyone who's seen Walt Disney's Donald in Mathmagic Land knows this to be so. Well, the axiom works in reverse, too: The physical stuff of the universe can model math right back. And to great effect. For proof ...more

Cyrus comes out tomorrow, having wowed people at Sundance and at SXSW where the directors, the Duplass brothers, had earlier success with their mumblecore feature The Puffy Chair. It's very funny, and very well made and it should be of particular interest to lo/no-budg filmmak ...more