The only thing better than successfully pulling off a new experiment is doing it with household materials. You get to laugh in conceit as professional scientists everywhere spend all their grant money on the same project you just accomplished with some under-the-sink chemicals! However, there are times when DIY gets dangerous. Some household chemicals are not pure enough to use and some are just pure dangerous. Let's take a look at two problems I have encountered in the course of mad sciencing.
If you've ever had teeth removed/minor surgery, you most likely received some laughing gas, or nitrous oxide. This gas creates a happy, lightened feeling, and causes instant laughter. In this article, I'll show you how to make some. BUT BE CAREFUL!!! DO NOT proceed in this experiment unless you have EXTENSIVE knowledge of chemistry!!! Misuse of this procedure could result in the production of LETHAL GASSES! However, the set-up is quite simple, if done correctly should not lead to any issues. ...
You're never too young to start building your vast swarm of robotic minions. Taking over the world requires a whole lot of robots. The sheer volume of robots needed means your first wave will have to be made of cheap materials. After they take over key resources, you can upgrade to Kevlar and titanium. But to start, let's make popsicle stick insect robots!
There's a time in everyone's life when they need to become immortalized and reprographed in a full-blown comic spread, complete with halftone dots and speech bubbles—or squares, if you're a square. With our favorite program Photoshop, you can quickly turn any hyperbolic celebrity into a comical farce. Even normal people can become vintage villains with a little pixelation.
Taking apart batteries is one of those things that every adult you've ever known has warned you against. Today, we break the taboo and dive into a lithium battery. Lithium has some pretty cool properties—it burns instantly in water and glows blindly bright under flame. And with just one AA battery, you can make a blinding light beam inspiring supernatural awe in all dictatorial adults who doubted you.
Jet engines combine oxygen from the surrounding air with on-board fuel to burn at very high temperatures and create thrust in the direction of the flame. Rockets, which we will learn about in a later post, are similar but carry oxygen internally and can therefore function in space!
Do you need to email your wife your Social Security number? Send confidential business plans to your partner in Thailand? Send your hacker buddies the recovered hashes from last night's breach? Try using GPG, a valuable and easy to use open-source encryption program.
Three Days without You Poem Description:
Apple is famous for their easy to use consumer software such as Garage Band and iMovie. However, I've found their apps a little hard to use. Why?
I'm pretty sure that it's a universal dream for everyone in the world to retire early. Who wants to to be stuck with the rest of the country and retire when you're almost 70 years old? You heard me right, 70! Most people can't go out and do the things they love to do by the time they're 70, unless they've been practicing good health and exercise their entire life.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. Mining obsidian is not only time consuming, but dangerous. Looking for caves with obsidian and risking death by creeper, zombie, or lava just isn't worth it sometimes. Luckily, obsidian can be farmed, just like cobblestone! You'll no longer need to put your life on the line for this most-indestructible of building materials.
Zynga just added another game to their Zynga with Friends series called Scramble with Friends. If you've ever played Boggle, it's basically the same thing, but is dedicated to playing your buddies just like Words with Friends or Hanging with Friends.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. A redstone sorting machine can not only cure a cluttered unmanageable Minecraft home, but make for an integral part of an efficient work space. With the redstone sorting machine, your items can arrive at the mere press of a button.
In honor of the new Astronomy World, I thought we should look at a few planetary icosahedrons. The icosahedron is the most round of the Platonic solids with twenty faces, thus has the smallest dihedral angles. This allows it to unfold into a flat map with a reasonably acceptable amount of distortion. In fact, Buckminster Fuller tried to popularize the polyhedral globe/map concept with his Dymaxion Map.
Now, I know what you're thinking... "I need an extra sexy coffee table that is like no other."
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. No self-respecting Minecraft house is complete without a state of the art automatic cobblestone generator. But what does the average Minecrafter need with a bunch of cobblestone? To put it simply, sometimes you just need a bunch of blocks. I cannot tell you how many times I have been in the midst of a trap, animal pen, or basement only to find myself short on the second most common block of them all.
As touched upon in the past, knowing all of the possible words you can play is key to being a better Scrabble player. If you don't have the vocabulary, then you can't compete against the best of the best, and you'll never even get the chance to spar against professionals such as Nigel Richards, Joe Edley, Andrew Fisher, and Wayne Kelly.
MineCon 2011 (held at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas) was in a word, awesome. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, the vibe was fun and nerdy, and best of all, the costumes were inspired. Below are my favorites, which unfortunately aren't of the best quality (lighting was low and super yellow, which wasn't helped much by my standard point-and-shoot). If you happened to attend Minecon as well, post about your experience to the community corkboard... if you're pictured below, please comment!
In light of this week's Giveaway Tuesdays Photo Challenge, we've posted a thorough guide to experimenting with bokeh photography. Most of the resources require a DSLR camera, and an intermediate understanding of some of the more technical components of photography.
Aesthetic Houses: What are they? If you've played Minecraft for some time now, you most surely know how hard it is to build a great looking house to live in, that meets both your vision of your dream house and expectations for functionality. This brings us to the definition: in terms of Minecraft, its a structure that dosen't compromise beauty and appeal for functionality.
Lockpicking is a skill that takes years upon years to master. Locks come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but have common ground in how they work. Most cylinder locks have "tumblers," which are metallic cylindrical objects that sit vertically to the actual locking mechanism. Tumblers have five or six holes with rounded key pins of various height in them, each needing to meet an exact height or the cylinder in the center (the lock itself) will not be allowed to turn. This is the reason why yo...
What if your fridge knew your food and expiration dates? What if your fridge could tell you which ingredients are missing and where you can get them the cheapest?
In a previous article where I suggested 104 photographers to follow on Google+, I received a lot of criticism because over 90% of the listed photographers were men. While women are currently not a majority on Google+, they are a definite presence, and they are active. Today, I highlight the best female photographers I've found on Google+ so far. This time I'm taking a slightly different approach. Since the best way to get to know photographers is through their work, I've included one photo fo...
It's one of the greatest fears among parents and politicians the world over—video game violence spilling out into reality. The shooting at Columbine and the more recent tragedy in Utøya, Norway have touched deep nerves in Western consciousness. And that's why there's a giant pink, juggling elephant in the corner of every production meeting and press conference for each shooter game that comes out.
Last year, Hasbro unveiled Scrabble Flash, an electronic version of the popular word game which consists of five SmartLink letter tiles that can communicate with one another using near field communication (NFC) to spell and score words. It's an interesting (and fun) way to build your Scrabble vocabulary for words ranging from two to five letters, but that's about it.
Most stateside gamers have probably never heard of Level-5. If they have, it's more than likely due to the charming and maddening line of Nintendo DS puzzle games, Professor Layton. Some might even remember Dark Cloud and its sequel from the early days of the PlayStation 2, and all eight of you PSP owners in the U.S. might recognize the epic Jeanne d'Arc. These games alone make Level-5 a noteworthy company, but they've quietly surpassed "noteworthy" status to become one of the largest and gre...
Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills.
Always falling asleep behind the wheel? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that there are over 56,000 sleep-related accidents each year, resulting in 40,000 injuries and 1,550 deaths annually in the United States. Don't want to be a statistic? Then you may want to try out ASP Technology's mobile application which aims to keep you awake when you're fatigued on the road.
Blizzard Entertainment is considered one of the most successful game developers in the world. Ever since the release of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (their debut Warcraft game) in 1994, they've set sales records and created genre-defining games with remarkable consistency. But the company wasn't founded in 1994—it all started back in 1991 when they were called Silicon & Synapse.
There are over 425,000 apps in the iTunes App Store and the Android Market has over 300,000 available, which makes it really hard to tell which ones you want and which ones you don't. One of the best ways to find new mobile apps is from your family, friends and colleagues—those who have similar tastes in games and productivity. And it goes both ways, which means you need to share your favorite picks with those around you. But what's the easiest way to do that?
Even with Apple's forthcoming iOS 5 updates to its default camera application, those upcoming features can't match what already exists in Global Delight's Camera Plus Pro. For $1.99, Camera Plus Pro provides users with over 100 tools for every part of the picture taking process, including video recording. It works with all versions of the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad 2 with iOS 4.1 or the later update. Let's examine what it can do, and why you will want to replace Apple's default camera with ...
Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills.
Though it could be argued that Apple's popular and widely used iTunes media player was responsible for the growth and explosion of podcasting, I would argue that iTunes is not the best way to manage and listen to your podcast subscriptions—if you're a iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch user. Instead, you will find that a $1.99 mobile app called Instacast (iTunes App Store link) is a much better method. Below, a short video introduction to Instacast, plus a written breakdown of its features. Mobile L...
The aging and maturity of video games as a medium has lead to some unfortunate consequences. One of these, perhaps drawn from the film industry, is the spate of remakes that has overtaken the game market over the last few years. It hasn't been as bad as the remakeorama trend in cinema, but developers have recognized the value in releasing the same thing they already made and making more money off it. Below, a roundup of some remakes of classic games released for XBLA recently, some fantastic,...
Over the past few years, I have downloaded several third-party web browsers for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, and the one I have found most advanced and feature rich is Atomic Web. While many mobile browsers have their unique features, Atomic Web could well be considered the professional browser for advanced web users. With each version of the app, the developer has included features that make navigating the browser more user friendly and useful for bookmarking, managing and saving website...
Dactyloscopy isn’t going anywhere. Forensic science has much relied on fingerprinting as a means of identification, largely because of the massive amount of fingerprints stored in the FBI’s biometric database (IAFIS), which houses over 150,000 million prints. And thanks to the departure of messy ink-stained fingertips, biometric analysis isn’t just for solving crimes anymore.
Do you have an awesome rig that is able to run anything you throw at it at 60 fps with maximum settings? Prepare to be humbled. The Witcher 2 is the first game in quite some time to tax your system the same way Crysis did when it first came out.
With so many wireless iOS networking apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch available, there’s very little reason to connect any of these devices to iTunes, except to update the software. Besides, importing and exporting photos using iTunes has never been one of the best features of Apple‘s mobile device process. Let me introduce you to 5 useful apps for importing and exporting photos to and from your iOS device(s).
In each day of our life, we see inflammation. We see it during sore throats and abscess formations in our bodies, and even slight tooth pain is a form of inflammation. Sometimes it's good when it fights to protect us from invading organisms, but sometimes it becomes bad when it occurs in inappropriate ways, like acne.
(This is a manifesto I wrote 2 years ago. I have never published it. It was a reaction to the ignorance I faced in graduate school from the modernist sculpture
