science projects

Without a doubt, the most fun thing I've worked on in my five-plus years at PopSci is the Gray Matter column. Nearly every month since mid-2002, contributor Theo Gray has come up with new ways to illuminate the world of elemental chemistry, often by setting things on fire. But far from your average YouTube-loitering pyromaniac, Gray combines sharp, lively writing with a gifted professor's knack for making the complex simple.

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.

With her team, Kathy Vandiver, director of the Community Outreach and Education Program at MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences, creates eye-catching animations of cellular processes like meiosis, mitosis, and DNA translation and transcription, using Legos. These sophisticated simulations of what is going on in the cell are used as teaching aids for both school-aged and adult students, mainly to pique their interest in the subject matter at the beginning of a class.

Popular Science spoke to Dr. Vandiver about her Lego creations.

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.

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.

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.