DIY

Gray Matter

Make Your Own Ammo

How do you turn molten metal into perfect spheres? Just pour it off the roof

About 230 years ago, molten lead that rained from the sky—historically something to avoid at all costs—became a clever new way to manufacture an important commodity: shotgun ammo.

Precisely round pellets fly straighter, but casting each in its own 1/8-inch mold isn’t exactly mass production. In space, making them would be easy. In zero gravity, surface tension pulls any liquid into a sphere, the shape with the least surface area for a given volume.

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You Built What?!

Make A Walking Beast

Six tons of steel that lumbers around on eight giant legs

Martin Montesano had been captivated since childhood by enormous walking machines like the ones in The Empire Strikes Back. A few real-life versions have been built before, but they never lived up to his vision. He wanted his to be huge.

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Kitchen Alchemy

Liquid Nitrogen Live

Next week in New York: sub-freezing temperatures

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!

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Use It Better

A Rapid AVR Prototype Programmer

A cure for the heartache of bent pins

If you've ever bent the pin on a microcontroller while trying to insert it into a DIP programming socket, you're not alone. Aligning those crazy pins again and again, while intermittently prying them out of the programming socket and then inserting your freshly burned chip into a target circuit, can lead to a long and sleepless night. Luckily, there is a cure for the bent pin nightmare. And this prescription costs less than $35.

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DIY Geek Chic

A colorful new book, Fashioning Technology, offers high-tech projects for the fashionable woman

Bored with knitting? Weary of felting? A new book called Fashioning Technology: A DIY Intro to Smart Crafting will pull you out of your craft rut, as author Syuzi Pakhchyan shows step-by-step how to incorporate a tech flair to your projects. Armed with LEDs, phosphorescent ink, and polymorph plastic, among other "smart materials," you'll be making fun and funky accessories and toys in no time. Projects range from "Rock Star Headphones" to a "Luminescent Tea Table," combining the trendy handmade movement with a hip aesthetic.

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From: Toolmonger

Turn Your iPhone Into a Tool

Five ways to put that iPhone to some serious work

The next time you catch crap from your tool buddies for carrying such a gadget-geeky cell, tell them to kiss your iPhone-carrying ass. Then point them here to see how handy Apple’s finest can be in the hands of a Toolmonger. I’ve found dozens of shop-friendly uses for my phone. Launch the gallery here to see five.

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Cheap Tricks

How to Make an LED Flashlight

Turn a regular flashlight into a powerful LED torch that will run for years

There’s an inherent dilemma in purchasing a flashlight: The really bright and long-lasting LED models are pretty expensive, and the heavy, cheap traditional ones always seem to be dead just when you need them the most. Good thing it’s possible to build your own superbright, reliable and inexpensive hybrid light.

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Build It

How to Hack Firmware

Customize a circuit’s firmware and make your own personal weather forecast system

If you've ever wanted to learn how to hack a circuit's firmware, a great beginning point would be SparkFun Electronics. Many of the development, prototyping, and sensor products sold by SparkFun come equipped with a special programming interface. Even better, most of these products feature downloadable firmware. Therefore, with just a modest amount of effort, you can modify one of these products' firmware, reprogram the circuit, and create your own customized product.

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We Have a Winner

Announcing the Build-a-BUG Challenge winners. Thanks to all who entered!

Last December, we launched the PopSci.com/Bug Labs Build-a-BUG Challenge. Users were tasked with building their ultimate BUG based off the BUGbase and BUGmodules—an open, modular consumer-electronics hardware and Web-services platform that you can use like Legos to build practically any gadget you can dream up.

The second-prize contest called for future module ideas. Bug Labs has more than 80 upcoming BUGmodules spec’d and in the pipeline, but that didn't stop you from sending in a slew of wholly unique and innovative ideas.

So without further ado (and in no particular order), below are our contest winners Congratulations to them and to all who entered, and keep an eye out for future PopSci contests.

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Kitchen Alchemy

Playing With Ice

The power to quick-freeze foods with liquid nitrogen opens up exciting new horizons in the kitchen

In kitchens all around the world, cooks are experimenting with liquid nitrogen. It is a dramatic and very useful culinary tool that can cool or freeze things in an instant. It is made of pure nitrogen in a liquid state. Daniel Rutherford discovered the element nitrogen in 1772. It makes up 78.1% of the earth's atmosphere by volume. In its gaseous state, nitrogen is odorless, colorless, non-flammable, non-toxic, and largely inert. Nitrogen is found in organic materials, foods, explosives, fertilizers, and poisons.

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Ask a Geek

Can I Get Files From My Home Computer Remotely?

Our geek explores the possibilities

Ah, that sinking feeling: You’ve just left for a business trip when you realize you’ve forgotten the PowerPoint presentation on your PC at home. No matter: With the right tools in hand, you’ll be able to retrieve your file regardless of where you are.

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Arduino Muscle Car

Convert a cheap, dumb RC truck into an autonomous “smart” auto

If you're looking for an easy way to add DC motor control to your next Arduino project, look no further than the Orangutan LV-168 Robot Controller by Pololu. Equipped with two bidirectional, low-voltage, H-bridge motor controls, this ATmega168 board can handle many of the tasks that are typically sought by Arduino DIYers. Plus you won't have to monkey around with lots of complex programming, either.

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Sound Minded

A designer chooses an unlikely material as the basis for his newest audio project: slime

That’s not a carnivorous blob escaped from a B-movie—it’s a musical instrument called the Slime-O-Tron II. When Brooklyn engineer Eric Singer isn’t building elegant, music-playing robots, he designs unconventional audio controllers that send digital signals, known as MIDI data, to music software, turning them into sounds. For his latest such invention (he built the original Slime-O-Tron last year), Singer cooked up some slime from a recipe he found online and infused it with graphite to make it conductive.

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Quantum Physics in a Glass

Two chemicals create a glowing (and poisonous) mixture that’s a window into the weird world of quantum physics

Before the discovery in the 1920s of quantum mechanics—laws that explain the way the world works on the very small scale of atoms and electrons—the fact that bleach and peroxide glow when mixed would have seemed like just another chemical reaction that gives off light, like fire or fireflies. But it’s actually a glimpse into the impossible.

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Kitchen Alchemy

Chocolate-Chip Science

Two days' hydration makes a flawless cookie, but the Kitchen Alchemists don't need to wait that long

I think that everyone in New York City read last week's article by David Leite on the Quest for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie. One of the main tricks from the article is to rest your dough for 36 hours before baking the cookies in order to improve the flavor. In my work as a chef I have often made cookie dough in advance and baked to order. I knew that refrigeration had beneficial effects although I had never tested the theory to the extent that David Leite did for the article.

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