The Raygun Gothic Rocket: First set of parts
3 … 2 … 1 … LIFT OFF! I’m very excited to announce that fantastic crew that brought you The Steampunk Treehouse has reunited with new recruits to start a new mind-blowing project: The Raygun Gothic Rocket. And, of course, Almost Scientific, has signed up! After you are done checking […]
Swine Flu Hemagglutinin
I bet you’re wondering what the Swine Flu genome sounds like? Well, luckily Stephan Zielineki has converted it to music. You can listen it it here. Swine flu has been sequenced.  More out of curiosity than anything else, I wrote code to translate a key gene into a piece of […]
This is all so cool …
Thanks DS!
Hang this up in your time machine
I knew having my own time machine would pay off some day. Thanks Jeremy!
Staplerfahrer Klaus
This German forklift safety video is packed with over-the-top gory humor. The action takes off at around the three minute mark and keeps building.
Will you be here tomorrow?
The worlds best industrial safety video … not for the faint of heart:
Amsterdam Real Time
Amsterdam Real Time During the months October through December 2002, inhabitants of Amsterdam were invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. The tracer unit is a portable PDA (Personal Digital Assistant such as an i-Paq or Palm Pilot), which is connected to a GPS unit (Global Positioning System). Using satellite […]
Brick laying robots and the democratizing of precision
I recently found out about the architectural work of Gramazio & Kohler who use industrial robots to build highly patterned brick walls. . I’m very intrigued by the possibility of creating highly complex, repeating, organic constructions by harnessing the high-precision capabilities of robotic construction. This is an obvious and natural […]
Making Typeface Video
Here’s a charming little video of an old man making typeface. Apparently it’s a trailer for a movie. Videos like this just make me smile.
Maps of science
This is literally a mapping of the influence that various scientific fields have on each other generated by Eignfactor.org: Orange circles represent fields, with larger, darker circles indicating larger field size as measured by Eigenfactor scoreâ„¢. Blue arrows represent citation flow between fields. An arrow from field A to field […]
Reuben Margolin Video
Reuben Margolin is a fantastic, kinetic artist who makes stunning wave machine. Take a few minutes out of your day and watch this Make video featuring him. Reuben and I are fellow member of Applied Kinetic Arts. Speaking of AKA, we are doing another show at Maker Faire this year […]
Almost Scientific Update: rockets, bridges, viruses, plasma cannons, self-replicating machines and maybe even a lamp
Hello all — First off, I’m sorry if anyone had any technical problems with the Almost Scientific blog over the past few weeks. Apparently it was hacked and had a dozen or so malware links in the footer.php file. It took some time to root out the problem and install […]
Making lightning in the bathroom
Over the past few weeks we have started some experiments with dielectric barrier discharge as a way of generating high voltage corona and plasma discharge across a surface. This is a technique used by Kerry Tunstall and Wade Enright to produce their high voltage work and they passed the method […]
Roman Signers Paraphuie I
While I was away at the Lightwave show in Dublin I took a brief side trip to Paris. While there I went to a really great exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo called Gakona where I saw this piece by Roman Signer called Paraphuie I. (paraphuie is french for umbrella) […]
Teaching Tibetan monkes science with tinkering
I just got back from a very interesting talk by the PIE group at the Exploratorium. They spent ten days in India teaching Tibetan monks simple scientific concepts with cardboard automata. They first had them study some pre-made automata and then had them make their own. In true Exploratorium sprint […]