Tragically L33T

Hip? Who talks like that?

Making Aerogels at Home

I came across a great read the other day about William T. Wood of Bakersfield, California. In 2003 as a science fair project he made aerogel. For those of you who are not familiar with this interesting material, aerogels are not gels at all. Rather they are a low-density solid material derived from gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly drawn off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. [Wikipedia]

Oh, and if you missed it, William was 10 years old at the time.

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  • Filed under: Science
  • Music and Man-Made Lighting!

    From Good Math, Bad Math.

    Ladies and gentlemen.. For your pleasure and edification, allow me to present… The singing Tesla coils!

    Yes, if you’re clever, and you’re willing to do a whole lot of work, you can operate a Tesla coil so that the sparking from the coil produces a particular pitch. Even you’re even more clever, you can vary the way that the coil is run to produce different pitches, and arrange it into a song. And if you’re really remarkably clever, you can set up two singing Tesla coils, and have them play a duet.

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  • Filed under: Technology
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