Science Method
Carson MicroBrite
We discovered this microscope while traveling in Paris, where it was recommended by a staffer at Nature & Decouvertes, who told us it was incredible for the price -- about $10 at the time. Was he ever right.
It comes with a base and a slide with some cotton cloth as a sample, but in practice we never use the base or slide. We just place the microscope on anything we want to look at, and click the LED light on for a terrific view. There is a 20x-40x zoom, as well as adjustable focus. It’s good enough that we end up fighting our kids to play with it. With it we’ve studied leaves, flowers, color printing (kids are surprised by the dot patterns), currency, rugs, even our own fingerprints.
Available from Amazon
$10 from Optics Planet
Manufactured by Carson
Comments (
7)
Favorite (15)Theo Gray's Mad Science
This is a rare home-chemistry book where the advice of "don't try this at home" is, for once, appropriate. I usually complain about the scare mongering of home chemistry, but half of the experiments in this how-to book really are extremely dangerous. But the other half are pretty cool. There are no explicit step-by-step instructions given for any of the experiments, just guidelines of what to do. Gray, whose column appears in Popular Science, wants you to do some research and not just be a "script kiddie." Stunning photos of what to expect from each project help. My son and I have done a few of these and they do work. The prime lesson engendered by this book is the sense that the material world is far more accessible to hacking than first appears.
Available from Amazon
[warning box near instructions for combing sodium and chlorine to make table salt]
Real Danger Alert: This is the most dangerous experiment in this book. Sodium burns skin and eyes on contact and explodes when exposed to water in any form, sending flaming liquid metal in all directions at high velocity. Chlorine gas kills painfully and spreads rapidly. Under no circumstances should either of these chemicals be handled outside the presence of an experienced chemist. Combining them borders on lunacy.
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FULL OF HOT AIR The exhaust port on a vacuum blows air from below, turning an ordinary grill into a raging inferno, capable of melting glass, iron, even itself if left unchecked.
All the components of glass can be found in two places: the beach and the laundry room. It's possible to melt pure-white silica beach sand into glass, but only at temperatures of 3,000 to 3,500°F. Washing soda, lime or borax (a traditional laundry aid) added to the sand disrupts the quartz-crystal structure of silica and reduces the required temperatures to a more practical, though still dangerous 2,000 °F, which I achieved with a backyard grill and a vacuum cleaner.
A charcoal fire fed with air from the bottom is hot enough to melt the combination of those materials into glass but not hot enough to make it truly liquid, so bubbles tend to remain and make the glass cloudy. I mixed the finely ground ingredients together and heated them in a cast-iron pot, then poured the molten glass into a graphite mold and pressed it down with a graphite stamp.
Soda-lime glass has the lowest melting point but must be cooled slowly to avoid shattering from the thermal stress.
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PEPSI PAINTING Tinfoil distributes the current to form a pattern through a stencil and a layer of paper towel moistened with Diet Pepsi.
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Homemade Titanium: With lots of heat, some flowerpots and common chemicals, you can turn raw ore into shiny metal.
An iron crowbar costs about $8; one made of titanium, $80. Solid-titanium scissors start at $700, and don't even ask about the titanium socket wrench. Titanium must be a rare and precious substance, right?
Actually, as raw ore, titanium is 100 times as abundant as copper. ... At temperatures high enough to melt it, titanium exposed to air catches fire. So it has to be refined, forged, welded, and cast in a vacuum or under inert gas--an expensive process.
Yet I was able to make titanium using equipment I had lying around. I did it with thermite reduction, a process commonly used to weld train tracks. In an iron thermite reaction, iron oxide reacts with aluminum and comes out as liquid iron. I just swapped in titanium dioxide instead. But that reaction, in which titanium dioxide transfers its oxygen atoms to aluminum, doesn't release enough heat to melt the materials.
So I mixed in drywall plaster (calcium sulfate) and more aluminum powder. They react to create huge amounts of extra heat, enough to melt the titanium and allow it to pool at the bottom of the container. Adding ground fluorite powder makes the molten metals more fluid and protects the titanium from air as it cools.
I used clay flowerpots, as suggested by Gert Meyer, who developed this procedure. When nested with sand between them, they last just long enough to let the titanium cool into beads of solid metal.
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Many of the topics I write about are things I did when I was growing up, and I survived. Without those experiences I might have ended up as a stock broker, or worse.
Science is not something practiced only in labs and universities. It's a way of looking at the world and seeing truth and beauty everywhere. It's something you can do whether you are employed as a professional scientist or not. While I have a degree in chemistry from a fine university, I've never worked as a professional chemist. I do these demonstrations in my shop on a rural farmstead half a mile from the nearest neighbor. (This is handy when exploring the louder aspects of chemistry.) Mostly I use simple kitchen and shop supplies and chemicals from the hardware store or garden center. I do avoid working in a real lab, because I would much rather tinker in my shop and find a simpler (some might say cruder) way of making the experiment work. Amateur scientists, many of them self-taught, tinkering in their shops and basements have done great things. Using a spirit of making do with what they have and seeing just how far they can take it, they make real contributions to the advancement of science.
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It makes me cringe when I see warnings to wear gloves and safety glasses while working with baking soda. It's called crying wolf, and it's deeply irresponsible, because it makes it that much harder to get through to people about real dangers.
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Some other chemicals, however, are not your friends. Chlorine gas kills, and you hurt the whole time you're dying. Mix phosphorus and chlorates wrong and they blow up while you're mixing them. (I have a friend who still has tiny slivers of glass coming out of his hands twenty years after he made that particular mistake.)
Every chemical, every procedure, every experiment has its own unique set of dangers, and over the years people have learned (the hard way) how to deal with them. In many cases the only way to do an experiment safely is to find a more experienced person to help. This is not book-learning, it's your life at stake and you want someone by your side who knows what they are doing. There is an unbroken chain of these people leading right back to the first guy who survived, and you want to be part of that chain.
When I do an experiment that looks crazy I either have someone with me who's done it before, or it's something that I've worked my way up to slowly and carefully. I build in layers of safety, and I make sure that if all else fails I have a clear path to run like hell (and of course I wear glasses at all times).
Anchor Optics
Remember Edmund Scientific, the perennial advertiser in the back of science magazines? They sold lenses in addition to all kinds of scientific knick-knacks and basement experimenter supplies. Anchor Optics is a division of Edmund's upscale optics company, selling mostly to professionals, but at a discount. They've got loupes and microscopes, but also Fresnel lenses, commercial grade front-side mirrors, laser parts, optical bench gear, prisms, and advance fiber optic stuff -- just about anything optical you can imagine at good prices, Anchor sells Edmund's surplus or "seconds" -- but only second in some cosmetic or inessential way. If you need a lens or an optical flat mirror of a certain size, you'll probably end up here.
-- KK
SkyScout Personal Planetarium
The SkySout is an interactive guide for exploring the heavens with or without a telescope. When you point it towards a certain spot in the sky, the built-in GPS receiver identifies a particular constellation and stars -- and you can then opt to hear an audio tour about the celestial items that have been identified. The SkyScout employs a database purported to hold 6,000 stars, 1,500 double & variable stars, all 88 constellations, and 100 deep space objects (galaxies, nebulae, clusters, et. al.), which will be more than enough targets to keep me and my family engaged for quite sometime. If the millions upon millions of light years involved with observable objects in space were analogous to a city map, the SkyScout can get you within a couple of blocks of your exact destination (which is pretty darn good!). Though the unit can be used as a spotter for those wishing to leverage a telescope, thus far, we enjoy exploring the night sky sans scope so the whole family can participate and listen to the audio lessons without having to wrestle for viewing time. It's proven very wonderful for engaging my young children in something they've grown to enjoy and I hope they carry forward in their lives.
We've now had ours for a few months and use it a minimum of once a week (mostly weekends, weather permitting). Mostly, we star gaze from our backyard in the ‘burbs -- not a "dark-sky certified" area with a dramatic showing of stars hidden by the pollution of city lights. But that's the point: there's so much to see, even in our own backyard! Our favorite function is the "tour" which lets us sit back and look upward while listening to a Top 20 list of objects identified as optimal for viewing based on the date, time, and location of our session. The audible lessons are really interesting and fun -- usually consisting of highlights and some esoterica of the object under observation. The kids really enjoyed the Summer Triangle stars and their corresponding Constellations. The SkyScout lesson for Vega (one of the points on the “triangle”) touched on the 1997 movie Contact, which I was then able to parlay into a deeper spiel about Carl Sagan. Another big hit was the tour of Sirius or the “dog star” in the constellation, Canis Majoris. Outside of their love for dogs, I perceived a “wow moment” when it was defined as a binary star system (and what that meant) instead of what looks like a single star residing up there. Another superlative moment was when I pulled out the SkyScout during the day and began orienteering through the constellations -- yep the stars are still “up there” even when the sun is shining!
Another plus, at least for my family, is how the SkyScout does away with the basic math required in manual astronomical observing. In the days prior to GPS-led apparati that were brought to market in the ancient, early '90s, astro-purists with an interest in locating various objects from within the observable astronomical inventory would have to understand basic algebra as a gateway to leverage a coordinate system (celestrial, equatorial, ecliptical, galactic, etc.). These systems involved somewhat complex equations for mapping the motion of moving objects relative to the observer's location and time. Of course, for professionals and hobby-astronomers alike, the employed utility of analog star charts, celestrial maps, etc. have historically assisted observers by removing the need for a truly granular comprehension of the underlying coordinate system(s). However, a solid understanding of coordinates (latitude and longitude) remained as a mandate for productive viewing. Of course, this explanation doesn't touch on the foundational math involved with telescope composition and its impact upon utility -- apertures, focal lengths, f-number, etc. -- but because the SkyScout is a viewfinder for the naked eye (rather than a scope or complicated tool), my kids can really stay engaged.
Come to think of it, the SkyScout is a little like the radio was at the beginning of the last century. My family can take a seat together (in this case, outside, actually as a reprieve from the TV!) and let the audio lessons on objects in the heavens drive their imaginations. There is something enticingly refreshing about leveraging your mind's eye while listening to the SkyScout versus always examining (or at least expecting) high-resolution digital images of all astronomical objects. The kids have taken to it naturally. Now, when the sun goes down, my young daughter is guaranteed to make at least one inquiry into whether we'll be taking out the SkyScout to "find a star."
Note: the physical manifestation of the product only has an audio port for the enclosed headphones. To get and keep my kids engaged, I use my iPhone accessory speakers so everyone can listen. Also, there are expansion SD cards with more data/info/audio tours. I have not used them, but they do seem like a great add-on for later to spice things up, especially if you're pairing the SkyScout with a telescope.
-- Rich Neal
SkyScout Personal Planetarium
$200
Available from Amazon
Manufactured by Celestron
Best home chemistry lab book
The very best chemistry experiment book for kids is the legendary and long-out-of-print book, the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Published in 1960 during the heyday of home chemistry, it was meant to accompany the millions of chemistry kits that were sold each year to typical American kids. You got real experiments with real chemicals. Not like the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain "No Chemicals!"
Among many other things, the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments told you how to make chlorine gas from bathroom supplies, hydrogen from flashlight battery parts, and rayon from scrap paper, etc. You can see why it was not reprinted in the decades following because of concerns about safety. I used my copy, which is now worth $200 on eBay, to do all the experiments in the book when I was 12, and went on to build a chem lab in my basement. As many kids did.
Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, 1960.
You can get a decent free PDF version of the Golden Book on BitTrorrent. Even better, there's a new great book for home-made experiments, updated for today: the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments from the tech publisher O'Reilly. The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is aimed at home schoolers, high school students, and lifelong-learning adults. It is aptly subtitled "All lab, no lecture"
The Golden Book encouraged playing around with molecules, with no agenda beyond demonstrating the power, principles, and diversity of chemical reactions. The Illustrated Guide on the other hand is a basement laboratory manual meant to teach you the basic working principles of chemistry. How to mix a molar solution. How to titrate. How to do quantitative sleuthing. It claims that if you go through all the chapters you'll be prepared to pass the college-level AP Chem Lab test. You would also be able to work in most laboratories. And of course, you would probably be able to follow most chemistry recipes from the internet, or at least to figure out what you need to make something chemistry-wise.
At the very least, this book should help cure any hysteria you -- or your kids -- might have about CHEMICALS. Sure, they can be dangerous, like your car. But we are surrounded by chemicals, and the only way to understand their real risks is to mess around with them.
Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is a fantastic teacher for chemical literacy. It will show you or your kids how to work with chemicals, and why they are fun. Some of the experiments are visually entertaining. Others are scientifically important. It's got wise advice about the few bits of equipment you'll need for your lab. The Illustrated Guide very handily provides substitutions for ingredients whenever possible, so you can work around harder to acquire or expensive chemicals and gear. And it very conscientiously gives proper disposal instructions for substances at the end (the first I've ever seen in a chem book). The author is thrifty, using no more stuff then necessary, and always suggesting ways to purchase the minimum equipment.
Other than the hidden Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, there are simply no other decent books for the beginner chemical experimenter. The ones you find in libraries are simply useless trash. The stuff on the internet is haphazard and inconsistent. Follow the instructions here in the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments and you'll be on your way to chemical literacy.
-- KK
Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments
Robert Thompson
2008, 432 pages
$20
Available from Amazon
Sample excerpts:
Using a Beral pipette to bring the water mass up to 100.00 g
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Everyone rightly treats strong acids with great respect, but many students handle strong bases casually. That's a very dangerous practice. Strong bases, such as solutions of sodium hydroxide, can blind you in literally seconds. Treat every chemical as potentially hazardous, and always wear splash goggles.
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MAINTAINING A LABORATORY NOTEBOOK
A laboratory notebook is a contemporaneous, permanent primary record of the owner's laboratory work. In real-world corporate and industrial chemistry labs, the lab notebook is often a critically important document, for both scientific and legal reasons. The outcome of zillion-dollar patent lawsuits often hinges on the quality, completeness, and credibility of a lab notebook. Many corporations have detailed procedures that must be followed in maintaining and archiving lab notebooks, and some go so far as to have the individual pages of researchers' lab notebooks notarized and imaged on a daily or weekly basis. If you're just starting to learn about chemistry lab work, keeping a detailed lab notebook may seem to be overkill, but it's not.
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CHEAPER BY THE POUND
Do not overlook the advantages of banding together with other home schoolers or like-minded hobbyists to buy chemicals in bulk. For example. a vendor may charge $3 for 25g of a particular chemical. $5 for lOO g, and $9 for 500 g. If you need only small amounts of chemicals, you may be able to cut your chemical costs dramatically by arranging with other homeschooling families or hobbyists to order chemicals in larger quantities and divide them among you.
The cost advantage is particularly great for chemicals that incur hazardous shipping surcharges. For example, if you order 100 rnL of concentrated nitric acid for $5. the vendor may add a $35 hazardous material shipping surcharge, for a total of $40. But if you order a 500 mL bottle of concentrated nitric acid for $15, the same surcharge applies, for a total of $50. If you divide that chemical with four friends. each of you gets 100 mL of concentrated nitric acid for only $10.
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MICROSCALE EQUIPMENT
The recent trend in chemistry labs, particularly school and university labs, is to substitute microscale chemistry equipment and procedures for traditional semi-micro or macroscale equivalents. Microscale chemistry, often called microchemistry, is just what it sounds like. Instead of using standard test tubes, beakers, and flasks to work with a few mL to a few hundred mL of solutions, you use miniaturized equipment to work with solution quantities ranging from 20 pL (microliters, where one pL equals 0.001 mL) to a couple mL.
Using microscale equipment and procedures has many advantages. Microscale equipment and procedures are less expensive than standard equipment and procedures, which is a major reason for the popularity of microscale chemistry. Using microscale equipment and procedures means that chemicals are needed in very small quantities, which are safer to work with and easier to dispose of properly. Microscale also makes it economically feasible to do experiments with very expensive chemicals, such as gold, platinum, and palladium salts. Setup and teardown is faster, allowing more time for actual experiments, and cleanup usually requires only rinsing the equipment and setting it aside to dry.
Against these advantages, there are several disadvantages to microscale chemistry. First and foremost, everything is on such a small scale that it can be difficult to see what's going on. For example, you may need a magnifier to examine a precipitate (or even to determine whether there is a precipitate). Because of the small scale, measuring or procedural errors so small that they would have no effect on a traditional scale experiment can greatly affect the outcome of a microscale experiment.
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PROTECTING WORK SURFACES
Some of the chemicals you work with may stain or otherwise damage wooden or laminate work surfaces. I protect my work surfaces, which are standard kitchen laminate counters, by covering them with rubber nonslip mats that are available in various sizes and thicknesses at craft stores. I also put an old bath towel between the counter top and the rubber mat. The mat provides a smooth. level, chemical-resistant work surface, and the old towel absorbs any liquids that run off the mats.
My advisor. Dr. Mary Chervenak, is an expert on paints and coatings. I asked her and my other advisor. Dr. Paul Jones. if there was any kind of paint that could be used to protect surfaces from most laboratory chemicals. The short answer is "not really." Standard latex, polyurethane, and epoxy-based paints and coatings offer reasonablv good protection against many reagents and solvents. including the dilute reagents used in most of the experiments in this book. However, they offer less (or no) protection against strong acids or bases or some organic solvents.
Still, as Dr. Jones commented, some protection is better than none, and in a sense you can think of these pints as ablative coatings. The coating itself may dissolve in or be eaten away by a strong chemical. but it may protect the underlying surface long enough for you to dilute, mop up, or neutralize the spill. It I used a wooden workbench or a similar surface. I'd put several thick coats of an epoxy-based deck or floor paint on it. and then protect it further with a rubber mat and towel.
Even if you take reasonable precautions and work carefully, it's almost inevitable that at some point you'll spill something nasty on your work surface. That's a good argument for choosing a work surface that's expendable. If you eat holes in a sheet of plywood or particle board, that's cheap and easy to replace. If you eat holes in your washer/ dryer. you may have some explaining to do.
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Chemical incompatibility matrix
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WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for anyone, from responsible teenagers to adults, who wants to learn about chemistry by doing real, hands-on laboratory experiments.
DIY hobbyists and science enthusiasts can use this book to master all of the essential practical skills and fundamental knowledge needed to pursue chemistry as a lifelong hobby. Home school students and public school students whose schools offer only lecture-based chemistry courses can use this book to gain practical experience in real laboratory chemistry. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course.
And, finally, a word about who this book is not for. If you want to make fireworks and explosives-or perhaps we should say if all you want to make is fireworks and explosives-this book is not for you.
The Singularity is Near
This book offers three things that will make it a seminal document. 1) It brokers a new idea, not widely known. 2) The idea is about as big as you can get: the Singularity -- all the change in the last millions years will be superceded by the change in the next five minutes, and 3) It is an idea that demands informed response. The book's claims are so footnoted, documented, graphed, argued, and plausible in small detail, that it requires the equal in response. Yet its claims are so outrageous that if true, it would mean... well ... the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of Utopia. Ray Kurzweil has taken all the strands of the Singularity meme circulating in the last decades and has united them into a single tome which he has nailed on our front door. I suspect this will be one of the most cited books of the decade. Like Paul Erlich's upsetting 1972 book Population Bomb, fan or foe, it's the wave at epicenter you have to start with.
-- KK
The Singularity is Near
When Humans Transcend Biology
Ray Kurzweil
2005, 672 pages
$20
Available from Amazon
Sample excerpts:
Misperceptions about the shape of the future come up frequently and in a variety of contexts. As one example of many, in a recent debate in which I took part concerning the feasibility of molecular manufacturing, a Nobel Prize-winning panelist dismissed safety concerns regarding nanotechnology, proclaiming that "we're not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities [devices constructed molecular fragment by fragment] for a hundred years." I pointed out that one hundred years was a reasonable estimate and actually matched my own appraisal of the amount of technical progress required to achieve this particular milestone when measured at today's rate of progress (five times the average rate of change we saw in the twentieth century). But because we're doubling the rate of progress every decade, we'll see the equivalent of a century of progress -- at today's rate -- in only twenty-five calender years.
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From my perspective, the Singularity has many faces. It represents the nearly vertical phase of exponential growth that occurs when the rate is so extreme that technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed. Of course, from a mathematical perspective, there is no discontinuity, no rupture, and the growth rates remain finite, although extraordinarily large. But from our currently limited framework, the imminent event appears to be an acute and abrupt break in the continuity of progress. I emphasize the word "currently" because one of the salient implications of the Singularity will be a change in the nature of our ability to understand. We will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology.
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Evolution applies positive feedback: the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. As described in the previous chapter, each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage. Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to create new generations of technology. By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology.
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Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.
MythBusters
This super educational series from the Discovery channel is now on DVD. �The two hosts, veteran Hollywood effects experts, test urban myths. You know, folklore such as: you get less wet if you walk, not run, in rain. Or, you can kill someone with a bullet of ice that leaves no evidence. Or, a small hole in an airplane at altitude will rupture into a large one and suck everyone out. If it involves explosives, all the better -- can a cell phone cause an explosion at a gas station? In each episode they build elaborate equipment to recreate the conditions of the myth in order to determine if the myth is remotely possible. Sometimes the apparatus is formidable. They bought a steel ship to test whether sinking it would suck you down if you were swimming nearby (a la Titanic). Their comprehensive recreation of the myth that a penny dropped from the Empire State Building will kill you is brilliant and probably the final word on the subject. The cool part is the techie way they approach the problems: make stuff yourself. As in the series Junkyard Wars, you learn a lot by watching tinkerers quickly build things that really work. But here, they are not just engineering. They are actually doing an entertaining kind of science experiment, with controls, measurements, and results. Once the defined experiment is completed they push it to the limit. In other words their approach to investigating an urban legend is this: first they test the conditions as stated in the myth, and then if that does not work, they try to recreate the results of the urban legend. For instance, if they can't get an ordinary cell phone to ignite overflowing gasoline at a gas station (and they couldn't), they'll keep modifying the phone, gas supply, voltage, whatever it takes until they can get results -- a spark from something like a phone that blows the station up. Cool! My entire family, including teenage girls, watches these with glee, and more than once, since there's a lot going on. And as a bonus, you wind up with a fairly good grasp of which urban legends have any veracity. Now on the third season, they cover three myths per episode.
-- KK
MythBusters
Season One
13 episodes, 11 hours
$50
Available from Discovery Channel Store
New Scientist
Science is the only new news. There is more and more of it than ever and I have trouble keeping up. I've been an off-and-on subscriber to the richest source, Science, but I am currently off it simply because I could not keep up with the weekly deluge of diamond-dense information it dumped on me. Scientific American is drastically uneven, and recently too preachy, so although I subscribe, it is not essential. Discover is okay but not as, well, scientific. Over the years, the only periodical that has remained a constant source of readable science news, with no dumbing down, and much uplifting of ideas, as well as providing a great sense of important frontiers, is New Scientist. It is smart, ahead of the curve of other publications, deep, accessible, and reliable. If you can only subscribe to one source of the new news, New Scientist is it.
I value it most for what it does not run. It doesn't explain what DNA is again. Rather it talks up to its readers, assuming you have basic science literacy. Think of it as an Economist for science. It wisely selects pattern-shifting stuff, and I've come to concur with its nose for interesting news that will stay new. Issues from years ago still read fresh. Yet it avoids hype and sci-fi wet dreams.
Much of its power stems from its reliance on subscribers rather than consumer advertisers for its income; it really does serve readers. But that also means this weekly British publication is on the expensive side. Rather than the normal $18 per year that most ad-inflated magazines in the US charge, this weekly will run you $150 annually. (There's a cheap intro price to get you hooked.) It is well worth the investment. May it live long and prosper.
-- KK
New Scientist
51 issues per year
$72 new print/online subscriptions
$40 online access only
Available from
New Scientist
$150 (renewals)
Available from Amazon
$70-$150 custom subscriptions & renewals available for students, educators, seniors, low income, and others. Call Elsevier publishers 888-822-3242.
The Amateur Naturalist
The best hands-on-guide to nature experiments in print. Chock full of projects doable in a few hours to a day, whether you are an adult or kid. Just outside your door, no matter where you live, is the largest laboratory available anywhere. Hello, living neighborhood!
-- KK
The Amateur Naturalilst
Nick Baker
2005, 256 pages
$20
Amazon
Sample Excerpts:
Mounting and displaying bones.
Forget plastic model-making - this is the ultimate model kit!
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Resist the temptation to collect lots of spawn or tadpoles. Although you often come across huge quantities in the wild, only a few percent of it will survive. So collect a small quantity of newly laid spawn - it should be quite firm and easy to separate with your finger. Half a cupful is an ideal quantity to achieve a ratio of three to five tadpoles for every liter of water (14-22 per gallon).
Take spawn from garden ponds wherever possible - it keeps your impact and disturbance of wild populations to a minimum. It is also good practice not to risk contaminating a habitat by introducing spawn, pond weed, or any other form of life that you have collected elsewhere. This is commonsense herpetological hygiene. Frogs in particular suffer from contagious diseases that may be spread unnecessarily in this way.
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Although the very fragility of a spider's web is part of its attraction, it is a shame to think that these phenomenal feats of design and construction rarely last longer than a day. However, if you find a web without a spider in residence, it is possible to collect and preserve one of these fabulous structures. Choose a still day and make sure the web is dry, with no droplets of dew.
You will need:
the most gorgeous orb web you can find
a sheet of newspaper
a can of white or black spray paint
a can of artist's fixative (available at art shops) or hair spray
a sheet of cardboard large enough to fit the web on and in a color that contrasts well with the paint
scissors
1. Position the newspaper behind the web so that you don't get paint all over whatever is behind it, then spray the web evenly and lightly on both sides from a distance of about 40 cm (16 in) - much closer and the pressure of the paint will damage the web. Leave it to dry for a while and repeat.
Gonzo Gizmos
My favorite amateur science experimenter has gathered the coolest hacks from his website into a browseable book. Here Simon Field tells you how to use disposable trash to make very small versions of hi-tech machines -- like a Van de Graaff generator, or magnetic train gun, or what he calls a plastic hydrogen bomb. The secret to the fun and enlightenment is to keep everything very small -- which makes it cheap, fast, and safe.
There's lots more amateur exploration at his wonderful website, but this plain book (black and white printing) contains a fine selection of his best stuff, and is great for an introductory gift.
-- KK
Gonzo Gizmos: Projects & Devices to Channel Your Inner Geek
by Simon Field
2003, 228 pages
$12
Available from
Amazon
Sample excerpts:
In the previous two projects, we stole high voltage from a television set to power our high voltage motors. In this project we will build a device that can generate 12,000 volts from an empty soda can and a rubber band.
�
The device is called a Van de Graaff generator. Science museums and research facilities have large versions that generate potentials in the hundreds of thousands of volts. Ours is more modest, but is still capable of drawing 1/2 inch sparks from the soda can to my finger. The spark is harmless, and similar to the jolt you get from a doorknob after scuffing your feet on the carpet.
This very simple toy uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a steel marble at a target at high speed. The toy is very simple to build, going together in minutes, and is very simple to understand and explain, and yet fascinating to watch and to use.
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My review of Simon Field's website, Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids, is here:
Bio Hacking Resources
I've been expecting tools for basement bio hacks any day now for about 20 years. They are getting real close, although most of what you can do with this stuff so far is elementary, trivial and not very useful. Still, here are a few do-it-yourself gene hacking resources finally emerging. The prime users are artists and students. Not a bad start really.
-- KK
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Creative Biotechnology
Not yet at the level of a dummies' guides, this book supplies explicit instructions for executing basic genetic procedures with a minimum equipment. The couple of hacks sketched out (cloning a tree, starting a culture of your own skin) are enough to get your enthusiasm going. I wish the material was better organized, and I wish there was more of it. The book is handy, but the PDF of the book is free and immediate.
Creative Biotechnology
A user's manual
By Natalie Jermijenko & Eugene Thacker
20 pounds
Locus +17, 3rd Floor
Wards Building
31-39 High Bridge
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 1EW
UK
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BiotechHobbyist magazine
First stab by the same folks above for on online magazine. Feature recipes and context aimed at providing hands on experience with biotechnology.
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Modern Biology catalog
The winter 2002 issue of the venerable hacker's zine 2600 had a decent article about bio-hacking.
Here is the $80 kit they recommend for introducing a firefly gene into an E. coli bacteria. It's made for classroom use, but will work fine at home.
Rough Science
A very cool BBC series wherein the crafty producers take a bunch of scientists and technicians to a remote location and have them recreate sophisticated tools and inventions using only the primitive materials on hand. Vines, wood, bits of metal, shells. Here: make a clock (with bell), or a device to record sounds, or how about a camera, microscope, soap and sunblock?; or go survey and map the island -- using tools of your own construction. You don't know science until you can roll your own. This 10-part program is highly instructional because you get to see technology reduced to its essence -- and because not everything works. The DVDs are expensive; fire up your TiVo to catch them on PBS; another new series begins this fall.
Rough Science
Directed by Sarah Topalian & David Shulman
2002, 90 min
Bullfrog Films
(Ignore the ridiculous price of $890 for the 10-part series DVD on the website; Bullfrog offers an undisclosed "home use" price of $200 for the set or $25 each per tape of 10 or $65 per each of 3 DVDs. 800-543-3764)
Also, a 2-pack DVD set, including the titles Gold Rush and Space Race is available from PBS
Crystal Set Projects
Pulling music and human speech out of thin air using some wire remains pure magic. I found the home-brew crystal radio projects in this book to be even simpler and easier to understand than those in the venerable Radios that Work for Free. The contest run by the publishers, The Xtal Set Society, seems to be to see who can build a working radio with the least number of parts. For kids it's a wonderful antidote to their usual plug-and-play mode.
-- KK
Crystal Radio Bonanza
2003, 222 pages
$15
The Xtal Set Society
800-927-1771
Midnight Science
Excerpts:
Crystal set radios pick up AM radio without batteries or electricity. In simplest terms, the broadcast station puts out enough power in the form of a radio signal to be picked up by a crystal set. The set's antenna captures this electromagnetic energy, and the signal then passes through the crystal detector and comes out as audio in the earphones. This mysterious process first intrigued great inventors such as Braun, Marconi, and Pickard, and it continues to fascinate electronics buffs, amateur radio operators, and engineers today.
The hobby of building and listening to crystal radio had its first and biggest craze in the 1920s. Once radio stations began broadcasting all over the country, people began buying and building crystal radio kits. At that time a true mineral crystal was used as the detector. The most popular crystal was galena, and a fine piece of wire called a "cat's whisker" was used to touch the crystal and find the "hot spot" on the rock where a station would come in. These days, many hobbyists use the modern-day diode instead of a crystal, but there are still experimenters who strive for the thrill of getting Radio Japan on a rock.
From "Low Budget Xtal Set," by WIlliam Simes. Bill's neighbor testing out the set she helped build.
The completed high performance crystal set with IN34A diode installed in detector clips for testing operation.
Diagram for low-budget xtal set using foil-lined paper protectors.
The Amateur Scientist
For many decades the Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American was a glorious outpost of dedicated enthusiasm. Here expensive scientific gear such as early lasers and x-ray machines were first presented in great detail as affordable do-it-yourself hacks. While the current editors of Scientific American stupidly canceled this clearinghouse, the old columns are remarkably timeless, and offer interested buffs the means to make cloud chambers, spectrometers, seismographs, telescopes, microscopes and all manner of cool instruments using only the most basic kind of stuff you'd find in basements or discount mail order venues.
As a service to this community of gear-heads, former Amateur Scientist editor Shawn Carlson and a part-time publisher have put together all the Amateur Scientist columns the magazine published from 1928 till 1999. The good news is that 100% of the clever drawings and notes are here along with a fine index, usable on the Mac as well as PC. The bad news is that it is an extremely clunky CD-Rom with a badly designed interface that awkwardly ties into the web. Yet, with this tool, one can tap into a remarkable treasury of enlightened tinkering and science hacking. Some of the projects are still state-of-art, and the ones that are classics will still make tremendous science fair projects.
Taking a bit of a hint from the extreme passion of do-it-yourselfers, Scientific American is slowly rounding up their best past columns and under the editorship of Shawn Carlson issuing them in subject-specific collections. See the second in this emerging series -- The Amateur Biologist -- above; it works fine.
The is one alternative to the awkward CD. Scientific America collected their best columns in 1960 and issued them in a single volume called The Scientific American Book of Projects for the Amateur Scientist, edited by C.L. Stong. Copies of this out-of-print book are available via online used book sites. The upside is the handy print form; The down side is that the text is not as searchable, and contains nothing after 1960. A lot has happened in amateur science since then.
Indeed, so much is happening that the best resources for amateur scientists are no longer in magazines or books, but on the web. By far the best site, with the most original material, and the best links, is a site called the Science Hobbyist, run by one Bill Beaty. I've never met Mr. Beaty, but I like his style. His site is heavily infested with a 'just do it' mentality: magnetic levitation prototypes, ball lightening demos, and "unwise microwave oven experiments." He specializes in material for science fair projects, cool toys, resources for nerds, and plans for dangerous 'don't try this at home' experiments, plus fringe science links, as well as critical thinking tools. It's the amateur science site that I've been seeking for years. If people are experimenting at home with it, it's probably linked here.
-- KK
The Amateur Scientist on CD-ROM
Bright Science
$20
Ingram SKU #717734
888-875-4255
Bright Science
Also from Amazon
The Scientific American Book of Projects for The Amateur Scientist
C.L. Stong
1960, 584 pages
Simon and Schuster
used copy $40 - $250, Amazon
Also from Book Finder
How to make the glass-bead lens of a Leeuwenhoek microscope
The Amateur Biologist
I go along with the received wisdom these days that this dawning era won't be remembered as the computer century, but the biological century. What has been missing from this upcoming bio-revolution is the hands-on access of garage science. When it is as easy to program DNA in your bedroom as it is to program a chip, that's when we'll be swept off our feet in innovations. No reporting or speculative essay has given as much of a glimpse of this future than this how-to book of basement biology. Edited by former Amateur Scientist columnist Shawn Carlson (who also wrote many of the reprinted columns) this text tackles such old-time skills as cultivating pond scum (one source of commercially valuable microorganisms), or hacking up a video microscope, or measuring the heartbeats of insects. In the last section Carlson gets into how to extract DNA from cells using kitchen utensils. It's wide open from there.
-- KK
Scientific Americans's the Amateur Biologist
2002, 228 pages
$17
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Amazon
Excerpt:
A kitchen laboratory includes most of the items needed to isolate DNA. A drinking straw, for example can be used to add alcohol to the solutions (a) and a coffee stirrer serves to spool the DNA (b).
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The most wonderful private garden I have ever seen is tucked away behind a modest house in La Jolla, California, not far from where I live. The gardener is a British-born psychology professor and dear friend who sends me home with fruit and flowers each time I visit. Recently I noticed that two of his plants, though very different in shape, produced flowers the exact same shade of purple. This observation made me wonder whether the two species might be related.
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One normally traces evolutionary connections by identifying physical similarities between species. So I decided to extract and isolate the pigments in the two flowers so that I could compare them in detail. That process is actually much easier than it sounds. In fact, using a simple technique called electrophoresis, I could carry out the experiment in about an hour for very little money.
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DNA is the largest molecule known. A single, unbroken strand of it can contain many millions of atoms. When released from a cell, DNA typically breaks up into countless fragments. In solution, these strands have a slight negative electric charge, a fact that makes for some fascinating chemistry. For example, salt ions are attracted to the negative charges on DNA, effectively neutralizing them, and this phenomenon prevents the many separate fragments of DNA from adhering to one another. So by controlling the salt concentration, biologists can make DNA fragments either disperse or glom together. And therein lies the secret of separating DNA from cells.
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The detergent actually does double duty. It breaks down cell walls and helps to fracture large proteins so they don't come out with the DNA. The people at Edvotek recommend using pure table salt and distilled water, but I have used iodized salt and bottled water successfully, and once I even forgot to add the baking soda and still got good results. In any case, try to avoid using tap water. To slow the rate at which the DNA degrades, it's best to chill the buffer in a bath of crushed ice and water before proceeding.
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For a source of DNA, try the pantry. I got great results with an onion, and the folks at Edvotek also recommend garlic, bananas, and tomatoes. But it's your experiment: choose your favorite fruit, vegetable, or legume. Dice it and put the material into a blender, then add a litter water and mix things well by pulsing the blades in 10-second bursts. Or, even simpler, just pass the pieces through a garlic press. These treatments will break apart some of the cells right away and expose many cell walls to attack by the detergent.
An amateur�s apparatus for measuring the metabolism of mice.
Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids
Probably the coolest source of educational science demonstrations I've encountered is this very book-like website written and run by Simon Field. Field has 30 nifty toys and gadgets that can be made quickly, cheaply and will amaze adults as well as kids. This is the only place I've seen that tells you how to make a magnetic linear accelerator, also known as a Gauss Rifle - it uses magnetism to shoot tiny steel balls. The secret to Field's method is that his demos are very small, requiring small amounts of material, energy, or money. Most of his experiments can be assembled - even if you buy the stuff - for a few dollars, and can fit in your palm. His instructions and visuals are simply the best I've seen in any how-to-book. Most wonderful of all, it's entirely up on the web for free. Hats off to you, Mr. Field. (He does sell kits, and parts, which may help pay for his server, I guess.)
-- KK
Brock Magiscope
The trouble with most optical equipment is that it won't get used unless it is out of the case, opened up, and powered on. But if it is open and lying around, it will get highly abused. I buy my cameras, spectacles, binocs, etc. assuming they'll be dropped and splattered, and they should hold up to this misuse. But until now I haven't been able to find a microscope strong enough to do its job yet sturdy enough to be left on the kitchen table ready for inspections by toddlers and teenagers. Now after several years of looking for an everyday microscope suitable for a busy family I found one.
The Brock Magiscope #70 is exactly what I had wanted. It has a single moving part that my five-year old can handle. He can put a leaf in and focus it right. Rubber bands hold the slide. For light the scope uses a fat fiber optic bent pipe which channels ambient room light to the underside of the objective lens (no electricity). There is no fussing, no adjustments. The viewing field is amazingly bright and clear, with a choice of 100x magnification, good enough for high school work. We've discovered we can press the lens of a digital camera to its eyepiece, focus on the digital screen and get pretty good microphotography shots.
And best of all it is practically indestructible. The thing is simple and rugged as a hammer. In fact it was built for the abuse of K-12 classrooms, which is probably as grating as a war. Brock offers a "lifetime replacement warranty, including accidents." If it breaks, ever, they replace it. And they do. (Some visiting kids manage to break the light optic -- I have no idea how -- but Brock replaced it with no questions asked.)
This tool is always on, always out (it sits next to the fruit bowl); we use it.
The Brock Magiscope
#70 with x4 and x10 objective
and x5 and x10 eyepieces
$175
Brock Optical Inc.
407-647-6611
800-780-9111
