Science Projects

Day One

It's Friday morning, March 6, not even eight a.m. High school students in color-coordinated outfits stand at ease under the high ceiling of the Javits Center, waiting for the New York City's FIRST Robotics Competition to begin. Over the next three days, sixty six teams will vie for the regional crown and spots in the national tournament, held in the Georgia Dome come April. Some of the schools have mascots. One team's red dragon boogies back and forth in front of another team's Darth Vader. Darth brandishes his light saber.

In only four short years since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, fashion designer and self-proclaimed nerd Diana Eng has appeared on the hit game show Project Runway, co-founded the Brooklyn-based hacker collective NYC Resistor, and studied biomimetics at the University of Bath in the UK.

When you're a performance artist, creating the right ambience in your show is everything. It all starts with lighting. So two years ago, my partner and I decided to build a lamp that would capture the aquatic theme of a show that our company, Radiohole, was putting on. We wanted to make a lightbulb look like it was submerged in water, so we used mineral oil, a liquid that's clear and nonconductive (we spilled a lot of oil before finally hitting on a fixture that was both portable and leakproof).

Enter the Bushwick artists' co-op 3rd Ward between 7:30 and 10:30 pm on the third Thursday of the month, and you'll be greeted with a cacophony of strange ambient digital sounds, a crowd of enthusiastic geek-hipsters, and free PBR. Welcome to the wonderful world of DIY digital music.

Science Projects

So you've lost your eyeglass case. Yes, again. Gets frustrating, doesn't it? Stop wasting time searching for stuff -- build a device that emits signals you can see and hear, so you can find what you're looking for instantly. Attach remote-control car receivers to any items you frequently misplace, and put the cars' transmitters in a control box that can activate the receivers' lights and sound signals. Then when one of the items goes missing, press the corresponding button on the box, and you'll have it back in no time. Or at least until the next time you need it.

Who says science isn't fun? Build this 5-minute rocket and you'll have hours of fun. Plus you might learn a thing or two about propulsion systems and rocket design along the way.

And the $64,000 question is ... does graphite conduct electricity? It certainly does! The video demonstration displays this quite convincingly. Graphite is an interesting material, an allotrope of carbon (as is diamond). It displays properties of both metals, and nonmetals. However, like a metal, graphite is a very good conductor of electricity due to the mobility of the electrons in its outer valence shells.

Dan Lathrop needs a bigger Earth. His old one is two feet across and 500 pounds, about 20 millionths the size of the real thing. And after four years of tests, it failed to generate a magnetic field similar to the real Earth’s, which shields us from the sun’s radiation and guides some navigation systems by pointing compasses north.

If you're going to be in New York City next Tuesday, there are still a few tickets left to the Kitchen Alchemy duo's class, "Chilling Out With Liquid Nitrogen."

Did PopSci's recent article on cooking with liquid nitrogen pique your interest? Learn first-hand from H. Alexander Talbot and Aki Kamozawa how to flash-freeze foods and shatter them; turn any cream into ice cream; grind olives into powder; and other kitchen-tech wonders.

The class is at Manhattan's Astor Center, August 26 at 6:30 pm. Use the secret discount code POPSCI when ordering your ticket and get 10 percent off.

Hope to see you there!