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Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

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Our pal Jared Bouck, whose light sculpture project appeared in MAKE Volume 24, has just posted a trifecta of simple, low-cost hydroponics tutorials for beginners like me. There’s a general-purpose single-plant bucket drip system with a sight tube, a CFL grow light cluster, and a simple deep-water culture system. [Thanks, Jared!]

More:

• Hydroponics – at home and for beginners
• Hydroponics system from junk
• Jared Bouck’s algae bioreactor project
• Hydroponic ferris wheel

UK designer Kyle Bean, who previously made waves with his laptop/book sculpture The Future of Books, makes all kinds of awesome stuff. These delicate matchstick insects are just the latest page in his impressive online portfolio. [via Dude Craft]

More:

• Match-heads
• Jack Hall - matchstick luthier @Makezine.com blog
• Full scale matchstick car
• Matchitecture - models made from matchsticks @Makezine.com blog
• Eiffel tower made of matches
• Titanic model made from 5 million matches

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The laser microscope builds keep rolling in. This one from reader Steve Davee may not look like much, but it gets the job done with stuff you've probably got in your desk right now. The binder clip serves triple-duty by propping the laser pointer up at an angle, holding the button down, and supporting the bent paper clip that holds the sample drop out front in a loop. There are more pictures in Steve's Flickr set. [Thanks, Steve!]

More:

• Rob's laser microscope build
• Make: Projects - Laser projection microscope
• Laser + drop of water = microbial movie theatre

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Rob Cruickshank built this sweet laser microscope based (at least partly, I presume) on my recent project. There are more pics in Rob's Flickr set, including one of the custom screw-fitting he made to hold down the momentary switch on his laser pointer. Rob also reports that water squeezed from an aquarium filter is an excellent source of microfauna-rich samples. [Thanks, Rob!]

More:

• Make: Projects - Laser projection microscope @Makezine.com blog
• Laser + drop of water = microbial movie theatre @Makezine.com blog

Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Biology | Digg this!

Data is everywhere. Dedicated citizen scientists can advance "professional science," even without any appreciable funding, by learning to intelligently navigate and draw conclusions from the oceans of largely un-analyzed public data that we swim through every day. This story from The Boston Globe is a fantastic case in point:

By scouring a photo-sharing website for tourists' pictures of whales, a citizen scientist from Maine has helped to document a female humpback's record-breaking 6,000-mile journey from Brazil to Madagascar. The remarkable voyage of whale number 1363 from one breeding ground to another is a scientific discovery for the social-networking age -- a study made possible both by vacation photos posted on Flickr and an exhaustive library of photos of whales' tails that scientists have built since the 1970s.

The tail of "Whale 1363" was first cataloged by scientists off the coast of Brazil in 1999. Then, two years later, Norwegian Freddy Johansen snapped a film picture of her off the coast of Madagascar. In 2009, Freddy scanned in a bunch of old negatives from this trip and uploaded them to his Flickr account, and this shot was found by Gale McCullough of Hancock, Maine, who regularly monitors tourists' whale photos trying to match tails. An online pre-print of her discovery was published today in Biology Letters. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]

Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Biology | Digg this!