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Sometimes you need to get in touch with a plumber, but many times you can actually fix the clog yourself with a little elbow grease. Same thing with headphones, cars and bikes. LifeHacker has a great collection of things you can fix yourself in many cases along with links on how to do the repairs.
Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
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I know school’s about to start (if it hasn’t already), but just in case you want to provide them with a few last educational activities at home, this geode egg project is a good way to get them interested in the science of crystallization.
There are plenty of online gaming sites for youngsters, but most parents would rather have their kids get off the computer and use their brains for more creative fronts. Tinkatolli wants to change all that by blending an online realm for children with creativity and real life projects. The result should keep kids entertained, mentally stimulated and improve their tinkering skills. I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t wait for the site to go public.
Comments Off Every day, scientists are striving to make our lives better and to better understand our lives through a range of experiments on just about every subject. Unfortunately, not all of these projects work out so well. These five experiments have all gone wrong, whether due to the errors of the scientists, the unexpected behavior of the subjects or because the public reaction destroyed what may have actually been an advantageous advance in the field.
Image via http2007 [Flickr]
While many test animals are killed in the name of research, many of them are at least being used to investigate potentially life-saving drugs. Perhaps the saddest and most spectacular failure of any animal-based experiment occurred in 1962, when Tusko the elephant (not the one pictured) was given LSD simply for the sake of seeing how the magnificent beast would react to such a substance.
Unfortunately, the researchers, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce, had no idea how much LSD it would take to dose an elephant. Rather than erroring on the side of safety, the doctors decided that they didn’t want to have to do the experiment again just because they underdosed the elephant the first time. They ended up deciding to give Tusko 297 milligrams, which is about 3000 times the dosage a human takes, despite the fact that an elephant weighs about 90 times more than the average human.
After being dosed, Tusko immediately started running around in his pen and soon lost control of his movements, eventually collapsing to the ground and going into seizures. To counteract the LSD, the doctors gave the elephant 2,800 milligrams of an antipsychotic. The drug reduced his seizures slightly, but didn’t stop them. After another hours, the doctors decided to give Tusko a barbiturate to calm him down, but it didn’t help. He died a few minutes later.
Two other elephants were later dosed with the drug and suffered no ill effects. Ultimately, the doctors that dosed Tusko summed up their experiment in Science by saying, simply, “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.” Even so, it is still unclear whether or not Tusko died from the acid or a combination of the three drugs given to him that day.
The effects of positive vs. negative reinforcement have fascinated scientists and parents for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, testing on a group of unsuspecting orphans isn’t the best way to find out. In 1939, Doctor Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa and his assistant, Mary Tudor, selected 22 children from an orphanage in Iowa. Ten of the children had stutters and the rest spoke just fine.
The stutterers were put in two groups, group IA that was to use positive reinforcement and other, group IB, that was to receive negative reinforcement. The non-stutterers were also broken into two groups, group IIB, that was told they spoke fine, and group IIA, who were told they were starting to stutter and needed to avoid making mistakes at any cost. The goal was to get those in group IA to stop stuttering and those in group IIA to start stuttering.
The impact on group IIA was exactly what the doctor had hoped for. The entire group started falling behind on their school work. The children started to second-guess their speech abilities and many stopped talking at all. One girl ran away shortly after the experiment ended. While Mary Tudor visited the orphanage three times after the experiment was over, attempting to convince the children that they didn’t have any speech problems, the damage was already done. Although none of the kids became stutterers, many of the children retained speech problems their entire life and most were reluctant to speak. In 2007, six of these children were awarded $925,000 in a lawsuit against the state for the university’s role in the experiment.
The study has since been dubbed “The Monster Study” by the public and scientists alike who were disgusted with the doctor’s methods.
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Sock monkeys are so passe, the new hotness is sock Cthulhus. Lear to make your own with this helpful book, Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred, that can also teach you how to build your own electric guitar, kites and screen printed tee shirts. Really though, doesn’t the Cthulhu sock toy make it worth it on its own?
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Many people put glow-in-the dark star stickers on a child’s bedroom ceiling. With this Instructable, you can go all the way and have twinkling fiber optic stars! The project is just one of many listed in Instructables’ Best of 2009 list. You’ll find links to the most popular projects of the year broken down by categories (art, home, food, pets, games, etc). Maybe you’ll find something to keep you busy during the after-Christmas doldrums. Link
This is one of the strangest craft projects I’ve ever seen. Becky Stern says she plans to continue working on different segments of the MRI to see how her project will turn out.
