openMaterials

A great new service has just been launched called BioTorrents, which allows scientists to rapidly share their results, datasets, and software using the popular BitTorrent file sharing technology. Here’s the abstract from the paper BioTorrents: A File Sharing Service for Scientific Data published on PloS ONE: The transfer of scientific data has emerged as a [...]

Refarm the city (aka re:farm) is a collective project started and led by Hernani Dias with the purpose of developing open source software and hardware tools for urban farmers. In its creators’ words, the project is a cross between a good meal (the crop, the seeds, the friends), hardware (the urban farm, the composter, the [...]

The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments was a children’s chemistry book written in the 1960s by Robert Brent and illustrated by Harry Lazarus, showing how to set up your own home laboratory and conduct over 200 experiments. The book is controversial, as many of the experiments contained in the book are now considered too dangerous [...]

This solar clothes washer was made by 2nd year art students from the École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence (France). The challenge was to make a DIY washing machine using only materials available in the sahara. The prototype shown above uses bicycle parts (the tires and wheel), bamboo, and a solar panel connected directly to a recycled [...]

Here are some great online resources, many in the public domain, for woodworkers. A favorite of mine is the classic Machinery’s Handbook For Machine Shop and Drafting Room: “a reference book on machine design and shop practice for the mechanical engineer, draftsman, toolmaker and machinist” Over at the Woodworks Library you’ll find a collection of over [...]

The OpenStructures project is an open and modular construction system where everyone designs for everyone on the basis of one shared geometrical grid: It is an ongoing experiment that wants to find out what happens if people design objects according to a shared modular grid, a common open standard that stimulates the exchange of parts, components, [...]