Most of us have made paper airplanes at one time or another, but rather than stopping at folded paper, [VirgileC] graduated to 3D printing them out of PLA. Then the obvious question is: can you cast one in cement? The answer is yes, you can, but note that the question was not: can a cement […]
Marble machines are a fun and challenging reason to do engineering for the sake of engineering. [Engineezy] adds some color to the theme, building a machine to create 16×16 marble images automatically. (Video embedded below.) The core problem was devising ways to sort, lift, place, and dump marbles in their correct positions without losing their […]
[3DPrintBunny] is someone who continually explores new techniques and designs in 3D printing, and her latest is one she calls “pause-and-attach”, which she demonstrates by printing a vase design with elements of the design splayed out onto the print bed. The splayed-out elements get peeled up and attached to the print during a pause. At […]
[Ben] may be 15 years old, but he’s got the knack for 3D printing and artistic mechanical design. When you see his 3D-printed mechanical jellyfish lamp, we think you’ll agree. Honestly, it is hardly fair to call it a lamp. It is really — as [Ben] points out — a kinetic sculpture. One of the […]
I’m sure you all love to see some colorful blinkenlights every now and then, and we are of course no exception. While these might look like coasters at a distance, do not be deceived! They’re actually [bitluni]’s latest project! [bitluni]’s high-fidelity LED matrix started life as some 8×8 LED matrices lying on the shelf for […]
Images that can be interpreted in a variety of ways have existed for many decades, with the classical example being Rubin’s vase — which some viewers see as a vase, and others a pair of human faces. When the duck becomes a bunny, if you ignore the graphical glitches that used to be part of […]
The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval codex written in an unknown alphabet and is replete with fantastic illustrations as unusual and bizarre as they are esoteric. It has captured interest for hundreds of years, and expert [Lisa Fagin Davis] shared interesting results from using multispectral imaging on some pages of this highly unusual document. We […]
Researchers at the University of British Columbia leveraged an unusual discovery into ultra-black material made from wood. The deep, dark black is not the result of any sort of dye or surface coating; it’s structural change to the wood itself that causes it to swallow up at least 99% of incoming light. One of a […]
Some of the neatest products are made from the byproducts of other industries. Take petroleum jelly, for example. Its inventor, Robert Chesebrough, a chemist from New York, came upon his idea while visiting the oil fields of Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. It took him ten years to perfect his formula, but the product has been […]