My fave magazine of all time, Make:, has introduced a new section on its site called Science Room. The new segment is joined by new products in their store, Maker Shed, including awesome lab equipment.
Head on over and get your science geek on!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
I’ve encountered the site before, but somehow I missed out on it’s geeky awesomeness. And from that site, I’ve hit a few others that give me that tingly, geeky feeling of wanting to build stuff–like finally build that cool workshop in the back yard in which I will build other, smaller cool stuff.
Thanks to that site, I’ve also encountered other cool sites that are new to me via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Like
There are more, and as soon as I organize all the bookmarks I’ve saved just by hitting the EMSL links, I’ll post them here.
One of my favorite sites is Cute Overload, and today I discovered that it has a counterpart, run by entirely different people, called Ugly Overload. Awesome!
Now, the interesting thing is that Ugly Overload isn’t about gross stuff (unless you think bugs are gross), but about the odd and not-so-cuddly creatures of the world. The thing that excited me most about the site is that there’s a lot of science to go with all that ugly. Here’s an example:
Bats belong to the order of Chiroptera, which means “hand-wing”. But did you know that there is also an order by the name of Dermoptera, “skin-wing”? (Think of the suffix “opter” and you’ll get a clue as to how the helicopter was named). [Link to original]
I love it! Ugly Overload now holds a spot right at the top of my mental blogroll, along with Cute Overload and I Can Has Cheezurger.
The latest MAKE: magazine bemoans the weakness of modern chemistry sets, as I did back in 2006, and comes to the same conclusion that the Thames & Kosmos Chem C3000 is the best available today. Even better, they offer hints on how to get goodies that aren’t in today’s chemistry sets.
Read about their hints for filling out your home lab on the MAKE: blog: Great balls of fire! Make your own chemistry lab.
MSNBC reports that SpaceX has succeeded on its fourth try to get its Falcon 1 launch vehicle to orbit. Watch:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FQhtMrUQlE&hl=en&fs=1]
Freakin’ WOOT!
MSNBC also reports that SpaceX will provide their Falcon 9 launch vehicle to NASA for ferrying supplies to the ISS, beginning later this year.
Commercial, low-cost (relatively speaking) access to space is getting closer! I hope AMSAT can begin to take advantage of these new launch opportunities. Maybe they can come up with some technology, as they did with ArianeSpace and the P3D, to improve launch capacity.
61 Nobel Laureates in Science Endorse Obama – Scientists & Engineers for America Action Fund
If it wasn’t already a done deal for me, this would have sealed my support for Obama. But then, he did answer the Science Debate 2008 questions way before McCain.
Wired News said, “A trio of Nobel Laureates reached out to the media together with the Obama campaign Thursday to explain their support. They sounded haunted by the past eight years of the Bush Administration’s unflagging record of fudging scientific evidence to suit political aims, and by its powerfully symbolic exile of its science advisers from the White House.”
Check out Obama’s responses to the Top 14 Sciencedebate 2008 questions.
(via DailyKos)
