brainwagon

This seems to be just about the simplest homebuilt laser you can make: a TEA nitrogen laser. TEA stands for Transverse Electrical discharge at Atmospheric pressure. It requires no vacuum pumps or glasswork. Someday, my desire for mad science will lead me here…

Ankit Agrawal, Bob Fougere, Mridula Oravakandy and Greg Siemens wrote up their B.S. report Design, Construction and Testing of a Microwave Radar System for Through-Wall Surveillance (PDF) format. I have only skimmed the report, but it appears they were able to detect people standing behind a test wall by using SAR (synthetic aperature radar) techniques. […]

I know that I’ll probably be stuck on some terrorist watchlist for posting this, but when you find the description on a DIY flamethrower, you just have to pass it along. Besides, I haven’t had anything filed under “Mad Science” in quite some time.

The rising cost of gas makes one consider alternative sources of fuel. Lately I’ve been hearing a great deal about biodiesel fuels. I found a recipe for cooking up a batch. Unfortunately making biodiesel still appears to be more expensive than ordinary petroleum (at least when made from fresh soy), so it might be a […]

Craig Good gave a link to melting metals in your home microwave. Surprisingly nifty, although I might be tempted to wear a lead apron. Of course, you could always do it the old fashioned way.

Today, the BBC is running an article entitled Rat-brained robot does distant art. The idea is that a collection of 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish at Georgia’s Institute of Technology is controlling a robotic arm at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and directing it to make drawings. Does this seem just […]

Sometimes you hit the motherlode of strange when you are just randomly surfing. I revisited Bill Beaty’s Amateur Science Page. It’s a great site, with many good projects and links for the amateur mad scientist. His site of the month is the fairly un-mad Kill B.O., an amateur research project into the use of anti-fungal […]