David Carter is the author of many silly pop-up books for kids - he also wrote The Elements of Pop-ups, a book about the construction and mechanics of pop-ups. He's put together a page of movies and PDF dies showing how to make your own pop-ups.

Evil Mad Scientists on sci-fi fruit modding:

One cantaloupe, a knife, and five minutes. Your very own (and very tasty) planet-killing superweapon.

"That's no melon!"

Phuaalvin happened to be visiting the Taipei 101 on May 12, when the Great Sichuan Earthquake occurred. It must have been terrifying to see that damper moving like that; according to Wikipedia, the damper weighs 660 metric tons, and is suspended from the 92nd to the 88th floor. A tuned mass damper is designed to sway and offset movement in the building.

Dover Publications has a really extensive catalog, everything from coloring and maze books to clip art to engineering and tech books. They're the publishers of the wonderful 507 Mechanical Movements. You can sign up here for the Dover Sampler - every week they send out an email with links to book content. It's a complete mixed bag, you never know what you'll get, sometimes it's really fun! This week there were pages from this Origami Aircraft book. They also give you discount coupons and notice of sales.

(More pages of the plane instructions are here)

Jason over at Haqckszine found the Tilted Twister, a LEGO NXT robot that can solve a Rubik's Cube without the help of a PC. It's really impressive to watch!

Just place the scrambled cube on Tilted Twister's turntable. An ultrasonic sensor detects its presence and starts to read the colors of the cube faces using a light sensor. The robot turns and tilts the cube in order to read all the faces of the cube. It then calculates a solution and executes the moves by turning, tilting and twisting the cube.

Building instructions and source code are available on Hans Andersson's site.

Well, they could use it for power. Physorg writes that Argentine scientists are capturing cow farts in plastic backpacks to try to understand the impact it has on global warming. They think that "30% of Argentina's total greenhouse gases could be generated by cattle." They're experimenting with feeding clover and alfalfa instead of grain - the cows that don't eat grain produce less methane. Hmm, Reuters says they're collecting burps - "At least 10 cows are being studied, Berra said, including some in a corral whose burps are collected in yellow balloons hanging from the roof."

(Insert your own burst seams and match lighting jokes here.)

More:
The power of poo

Gever Tulley from the Tinkering School gave us this tinkering update:

We're off to test our canvas and PVC boats (eerily synchronistically coincident with the PVC and duct tape boat article) today in the harbor. Our boats are made with canvas that we are sealing with melted wax. The kids also built a cantilever bridge out of eucalyptus saplings, and a giant pinball machine on a 4x8 foot piece of melamine.

Gever says there is thrilling coverage nightly on their blog. (I want to go to Tinkering School!)

More:
5 dangerous things you should let your kids do
PVC Pipe & duct tape canoe

Crabfu. Is there no stopping this guy? He seems to be cranking out a bot or other cool creation on a near-weekly basis. Here's his latest, a remote-controlled golfing "bot."

Putter Bot

I just found this great tutorial on image transfer - they cover lots of different transfer mediums for use on wood, paper, fabric, and glass. Xylene is a really toxic chemical, I'd stay away from it - the other mediums are pretty benign. I never knew you could use caulk!

An image transfer is, to put it simply, the act of transferring an image from one source to another. Depending upon what material you are wanting to transfer onto will depend on what type of transfer method you want to use. What I love about transfers as opposed to just taking the image itself and gluing it down, is the transparent effects you can get from transfers-- allowing you to layer images or let the surface design show through. i.e. as a patterned fabric or woodgrain.

Jon Edmiston wrote a nicely flexible C# application to control a LEGO NXT car with a Wiimote - he says he could switch the remote out for a Wii balance board and he could still control the car. via NXT Step

Tinselman had a link to these wonderfully confusing images. Nothing is actually moving on the screen - they work if you print them out, too. Here's a short explanation of the peripheral drift illusion. And I found this article on the science of optical illusions.

Tyler over at Oddstrument Collection is running a garden instrument contest this summer.

Send in your garden musical instruments. Things like wind chimes, outdoor gongs, bells, fountains, musical sculptures, etc. Think solar, wind, water powered and beyond.

Let us know if you enter!

The University of Nottingham has produced a series of YouTube videos, each about a different element. Here's their YouTube channel (via BoingBoing), and here is their website for more information. I poked around a bit and found out that there's a documentary being made about the scientists, and they're posting wonderful snippets here. They're really fun to watch, and go handily with Robert Thompson's Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments.

We pointed out this great Instructable on making LED light drawing pens a while back. Stuart and Lori have a really neat tutorial about light drawing on their site, LightDoodles. (I've always loved this picture of Picasso.)

Light doodling or light drawing can be described as the simple act of capturing the trace of a narrow moving source of light using long exposure photography, long being defined as seconds or minutes. The moving light source will then appear in the finished picture as more then what actually exists and is truely a representation of time as well as space and movement.

This makes me want an iPhone - you can get these awesome Netter's Anatomy flashcards. (via Street Anatomy)

Here's a messy dissection of a Magic 8-Ball. Really, don't taste the blue fluid - sheesh, I can't believe they did that.

And I love the idea of modding one. If you were careful, you could repackage it and give it as a gift.

Over at LadyAda's Tea Party, aspro648 posts about a recent family reunion where they used Adafruit's Game of Life electronics kits as a build activity for the tweens and teens. They built and joined ten GoL kits. Cool idea!

Game of Life - 10 boards!

More:

• Game of Life - An electronics kit
• Game of Life Kit - Make: Video Podcast

From the Maker Shed:

Game of Life Board
Our Price: $17.50
In 1970, John Conway came up with a 1-player game called Game of Life. The Game of Life is a mathematical game that simulates 'colonies' that grow or die based on how crowded or lonely they are and is known for the way it creates a beautiful organic display out of randomness. Here is a design for a simple electronic project that plays Conway's Game of Life. Make one kit and keep it on your desk, or attach multiple kit modules together to create a large display. Originally created by Dropout Design, this revision adds a few extra features. The kit is very easy to make and an excellent first electronics project. It is perfect for workshops since at the end everyone can connect their completed module together.

Papercraft Paradise has links to a couple really neat paper models. Konicaminolta has a wonderful fiddler crab model. There are 2 PDFs - one has the parts, the other has instructions. And Kirin has a cute polar bear papercraft with a wobbly head; also has 2 pdfs. (you have to click through a couple times to get to the bear)

Jerome Demers, who did the BeetleBot project in Volume 12 of MAKE, has posted an updated version of the project, which is says is simpler to build, on Instructables.

How to Build a Robot - The BeetleBot v2 ( Revisited)

From the pages of MAKE:

MAKE Volume 12: if you are a subscriber you can read it now in the include (free) digital edition... - Link.

If you don't have MAKE you can start with the latest volume by subscribing and you'll get access to the digital editions right away too. Since you're reading this on the Make: Blog we can give you a special code that takes an additional $5 off (USD) it's CMAKE and it will get you MAKE @ $29/year, that's half off the cover price. Click here to subscribe and get started with MAKE!

If you decide to hang out indoors this week, take a look at this Florida State University gallery of phytochemical micrographs- micrographs are photographs taken through microscopes; phytochemicals are chemicals produced by plants.

Capsaicin - This chili pepper-derived spice packs the wallop in your hot tamale, but it is also a digestive aid, a topical painkiller, and a potential cancer-fighting compound.

I love this picture, it looks like some wonderful textile art.

More:
Velcro being pulled apart
Build your own digital microscope
Microscopy photo pool

Gunk on Floor (where do people get these names??) put together a great Instructable on making a spy periscope - it's a classic kid's project.

Our pal John Edgar Park has posted photos of his building of the new ThingamaKIT from Bleep Labs.

As long as you're still hanging around outside, esprit cabane has an easy tutorial for skeletonizing leaves. (I'd skip the bleach step.)

I'm a big fan of guerilla gardening - neglected or abandoned urban spaces can be pretty bleak, it's neat when people take the time to brighten things up. Heavy Petal Gardening has an easy recipe for Seed bombs - make sure you use seeds that are native to your area. (I especially like the way these look - people will think there have been dung beetles around.)

Our city prohibits street fireworks within the city limits (though you couldn't tell from the noise on 4th of July night!). We're going to contribute our own safe, legal noises this year with some Really Obnoxious Noise Makers from this Instructable.

Matt Kirkland peels back our illusions about cute robot toys, via Bot Junkie. The machine inside the ghost?

The NXT STEP's BlueToothKiwi made an NXT Wall-E; he's shared instructions on NXTLOG.

He also points us to the adorable Wall-E Joe Meno made out of LEGO - there are lots of pictures in his Flickr set. Bigger eyes!

More:
Disney intros new bots @ Maker Faire
HOW TO - Build your own Wall-E robot

Natalie @ Craft found this fun tutorial on making a Super Foam-erator - a great easy (and messy!) kid's project for out in the yard.

Saturday I went to Artopia in Seattle's Georgetown area. Lots of cool art everywhere! Divide from Hazard Factory explained his (very loud) jelly bean gun, yet another way to dramatically fling things into the air. Only use this outside!

More:
Make a Spud Gun Instructions and 3D PDF
The SGTC Mega-Launcher Spudgun

Here's another cool project from Studio 3D - a smart domino run, with an option for using a LEGO RCX brick.