David Ng has a great guide to building your very own sub-atomic-particle-spotting device. Read the rest

The Joule Thief is a way of producing enough electricity to run small, but useful, electric lights using cast-off trash like pop-can tabs and "dead" batteries. It's especially handy in the Himalayas, writes inventor and Google Science Fair judge T.H. Culhane. There, electricity is a precious resource. But the components needed to build a Joule Thief are abundant, thanks to climbers and tourists who leave behind all sorts of surprisingly useful litter.

Last week, Culhane joined a G+ hangout sponsored by National Geographic and Girlstart to talk about the value in things we throw away and walk viewers through the construction of their very own Joule Thief. You can watched the video of the event, or read the instructions for building a Joule Thief at Culhane's blog.

The fact that the Joule thief allows one to run a 3V LED from a 1.5 or 1.2 Volt battery would itself be astounding, because it means you only need half the number of batteries to get the same light.

Some of you are thinking "wait, maybe it enables you to use a single 1.5 volt battery to light a 3V LED instead of the usual two, but doesn't it just make that battery last half as long? Great question, but the answer is that the Joule Thief, which works by building up and collapsing a magnetic field around the torus (which acts as an electromagnetic inductor) actually is more efficient than using a battery directly because it PULSES the energy to the LED.

I cleaned out the attic recently, throwing away several of my husband's old chemistry and jewelry making catalogs. Which reminded me of this video sent to by Bill Beatty, in which he talks about how you could use catalogs like that as a medium for growing oyster mushrooms (aka, one of the yummy mushrooms).

Bill includes a set of instructions for this on his website, but he admits, this is somewhat theoretical as he hasn't pulled it off himself, yet. What about you? Have any of you grown mushrooms on catalogs or other unique medium? What do you think of Bill's proposed system?

Need:

Old phone book or catalog (thick one) small trash bags ("tall kitchen can bags") Large 6qt boiling pot Distilled water ($1 gallon jug from a drug store) 1 Tbs Baking soda one pound of very fresh large oyster mushrooms

Do:

First need to somehow sterilize (pasteurize) your old catalog. I'll try baking mine for two or three hours at 300F on a foil-covered cookie sheet. Then I'll boil a couple of quarts of distilled water in my biggest pasta pot, add a teaspoon of baking soda, then dunk the catalog and let it soak and swell up. (Use less soda? How much water to swell up a catalog without saturating it?)

Add mushrooms to cooled catalog: I'll try slicing the mushrooms very thin, then adding slices to many places in the catalog. If that doesn't work, maybe I'll blender the mushrooms in cold distilled water and use it instead.