Category Archives: Mad Science

An Undergraduate Project in Imaging Radar

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’ve often wondered if you could do this with cheap 10ghz Gunnplexer horns. I’ll have to read this over in greater detail later.

Biodiesel

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 while before this catches on, but the chemistry is at least mildly interesting. I was trying to sort out the potential for using waste fats and oil, but it seems rather obvious that even when my diet consisted largely of fried food, I used more gasoline by volume than cooking oil. Thus, while using waste oil may be temporarily cheap, there simply isn’t enough supply to make it more than a curiousity on the path to renewable energy.

Holy Rat Brains, Batman!


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 the teensiest bit strange to people?

The scientists describe the rat-brain as ‘semi-living artistic entities”. Somehow this conjures up the image of Vincent Van Gogh’s zombie corpse, staggering around chanting alternately “Brains…” and “Crayons…”.

Of course the real question is “who is funding this mad science, and how can I get in on it?”. Perhaps this technology could be applied to making sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.

You can check out more on this project at the MEART webpage.


All for the sake of science…

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 creams
to prevent body odor. Far more entertaining is the
Stinky Feet web page. Witness the trials and tribulations of a
guy willing to stomp around the Central Square YMCA locker room, then attach plastic bags around his feet for days to give himself
athletes foot.

If that’s not mad science, I don’t know what is.