Geek Gifts

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11 cheap gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks

Science comes up with a lot of awesome stuff, and you don't need a Ph.D, a secret lab, or government funding to get your hands on some of the coolest discoveries. We've got a list of 11 mostly affordable gifts that are guaranteed to blow your mind, whether or not you're a science geek.

Click on any image to see it enlarged.

1. Aerogel

Also known as frozen smoke, Aerogel is the world's lowest density solid, clocking in at 96% air. It's basically just a gel made from silicon, except all the liquid has been taken out and replaced with gas instead. If you hold a small piece in your hand, it's practically impossible to either see or feel, but if you poke it, it's like styrofoam.
Aerogel isn't just neat, it's useful. It supports up to 4,000 times its own weight and can apparently withstand a direct blast from two pounds of dynamite. It's also the best insulator in existence, which is why we don't have Aerogel jackets: it works so well that people were complaining about overheating on Mt. Everest.
Price: $35

2. EcoSphere

Inside these sealed glass balls live shrimp, algae, and bacteria, all swimming around in filtered seawater. Put it somewhere with some light, and this little ecosystem will chug along happily for years, no feeding or cleaning necessary, totally oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world exists outside.
EcoSpheres came out of research looking at ways to develop self-contained ecosystems for long duration space travel. They're like little microcosms for the entire world, man. But ask yourself: are we the shrimp, or the algae?
Price: $80

3. Mars Rock

NASA has been trying to figure out how to get a sample of rock back from Mars for a while now. You can beat them to the punch and pick up a little piece of the red planet without having to travel a hundred million miles, by just taking advantage of all the rocks Mars sends our way.
Every once in a while, a meteorite smashes into Mars hard enough to eject some rocks out into orbit around the sun. And every once in a while, one of these rocks lands on Earth. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, and whoever finds the meteorite is allowed to cut it up into bits and sell it to people who want to have their very own piece of another planet.
Price: $70+

4. Gömböc

The Gömböc is a self-righting object, which means that no matter which way you put it down, it stands itself back up. It's like a Weeble, except it doesn't cheat by having a weight at the bottom, and it's the only shape that can do this.
The existence of a shape with these properties was conjectured in 1995, but it took ten years for someone to figure out how to actually make one that worked. And then everyone was embarrassed when it turned out that turtles had evolved this same basic shape in their shells a long time ago, to make it easier for them to roll themselves back over if they get flipped.
Price: $150

5. Violet Laser Pointer

It's no longer geeky enough to have a red laser pointer, or a green laser pointer, or even a blue laser pointer. Keep moving up the spectrum until you get to violet, and you'll find the new hotness at 405 nanometers.
So what's next year's new color going to be? It's looking like orange, but they're not quite what I'd call affordable yet. Something to look forward to for next year, especially if you're going for your own personal laser rainbow.
Price: $110

6. Gallium

Gallium is a silvery metal with atomic number 31. It's used in semiconductors and LEDs, but the cool thing about it is its melting point, which is only about 85 degrees Fahrenheit. If you hold a solid gallium crystal in your hand, your body heat will cause it to slowly melt into a silvery metallic puddle. Pour it into a dish, and it freezes back into a solid.
While you probably shouldn't lick your fingers after playing with it, gallium isn't toxic and won't make you crazy like mercury does. And if you get tired of it, you can melt it onto glass and make yourself a mirror.
Price: $80

7. Miracle Berries

By themselves, Miracle berries don't taste like much. The reason to eat them is that they contain a chemical called miraculin that binds to the sweet taste receptors on your tongue, changing their shape and making them respond to sour and acidic foods.
The upshot of this effect is that some things you eat taste spectacularly different. Straight Tabasco sauce tastes like donut glaze. Guinness tastes like a chocolate malt. Goat cheese tastes like cheesecake. After about an hour of craziness, your taste buds go back to normal, no harm done.
Price: $15

8. DNA Genotyping

There's nothing more personal than someone's own DNA. And there are ways to give the gift DNA that won't get you children or arrested. With just a little bit of spit, you can get an genotype analysis that will reveal fun insights about longevity, intelligence, susceptibility to diseases, and even food preferences.
While the technology hasn't reached the point where you can affordably get a complete sequence of an entire genome, looking at specific markers is still good enough to suggest some things worth looking out for while spurring a lively nature versus nurture debate.
Price: $100

9. Klein Bottle

If you want to give a mathematician something to try to wrap their head around, a Klein bottle is a good place to start. A real Klein bottle is an object with no inside and no outside that can only exist in four dimensions. These glass models exist in three, which means that unlike the real thing, they can actually hold liquid.
The difference between the models and the real thing is that by adding an extra dimension, you can make it so that the neck of the bottle doesn't actually intersect the side of the bottle. Take a couple aspirin and try to picture that in your head.
Price: $35

10. Giant Plush Microbes

They're cute! They're fuzzy! They're potentially deadly! All of the microbes, bacteria, and viruses that you know and love (or maybe not) are available in huggable forms about a million times larger than real life. In the picture are gonorrhea, syphilis, mono, and herpes.
These giant plushes are the perfect way to make the holidays even more awkward, when you present your friends with a variety of adorable STDs. Microbiologists, at least, will appreciate that they're more or less anatomically correct, too.
Price: $9

11. Ferrofluid

Magnetic particles suspended in oil never looked so sexy. That's all a ferrofluid is, and it looks pretty gross until you put it in close proximity to a magnet, at which point it grows spikes all over the place as the fluid flows out along magnetic force lines.
Ferrofluids are found in everything from speakers to hard drives, but it's much more fun to play with when when you've got a puddle of it naked and out in the open.
Price: $40

Like this list? Check out our Holiday Gift Guide, which is an easy place to find all of our holiday gift lists for 2011.

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Powerful microscope

World's Most Powerful Optical Microscope Lets Researchers See Inside Viruses

New technology breaks the theoretical limit on how small we can see

By Rebecca BoylePosted 03.01.2011 at 2:40 pm11 Comments

SEM Comparison Section A shows a microsphere superlens image of a commercial Blu-Ray DVD disc. The 100-μm-thick transparent protection layer of the disc was peeled off before applying the microsphere. The 100-nanometer lines (top left SEM image) are seen by the microsphere superlens at top right. Section B shows an image of a star structure made for the film covering the Blu-Ray disc. The SEM is at 500 nanometers; the optical microscope is at 5 micrometers. Li and Wang, University of Manchester

A new microscope combines a normal optical scope with a see-through microsphere superlens, beating the diffraction limit of light and shattering the limits of optical microscopes.

With the new method, there is theoretically no limit on how small an object researchers will be able to see. It could potentially see inside human cells and examine live viruses for the first time.

The standard optical microscope can only see items down to about one micrometer. To see things in the nanoscale, researchers use methods like scanning tunneling microscopes, scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy.

But these techniques are limited in scope, especially for applications like medicine. Electron microscopes can only see the surface of a cell, rather than examining its structure, for instance. And there is no way to see a live virus in action.

The new method works by integrating a microsphere “superlens” with a traditional optical microscope. The spheres magnify images of items that are placed on the microscope plate, touching the microsphere and forming “virtual images,” according to authors Zengbo Wang, Wei Guo and Lin Li of the University of Manchester, UK. The optical microscope magnifies the virtual images, forming a greatly enhanced image.

“The microspheres are in contact with objects, and the microscope must focus below the object surface to capture the image. This is a very different practice from the normal use of microscopes,” Li said in an e-mail.

Optical diffraction limits dictate that the smallest object that can be seen is around half the optical wavelength. For visible light, this is about 200 nanometers to 700 nanometers. That means the smallest thing you can actually see is about 200 nanometers — pretty small, but not small enough to resolve interesting molecules and cells.

The new method allowed Li and colleagues to see objects at 50 nanometers, he said.

“This clearly breaks the theoretical optical imaging limit,” he said.

Microsphere Microscope: Li and Wang, University of Manchester

It also overcomes some drawbacks associated with electron microscopes. A TEM sends a beam of electrons through an object, interacting with it as they pass through it. The device forms an image of this interaction and magnifies it. An SEM scans an object with a high-energy electron beam, which also interacts with the sample. The interaction can provide information about the object’s topography and composition. An STM applies a voltage very close to an object, allowing electrons to tunnel through the space between them. This current can be monitored as the voltage tip moves across the object, and is translated into an image. And an AFM essentially feels a surface using a mechanical probe.

Optical fluorescence microscopes can see inside cells by dyeing them, but it can’t penetrate viruses, and it would be nice to see cells without having to inject them with dye. What’s more, the electron methods involve chemical reactions that must be accounted for. Last year, for instance, IBM researchers made an AFM image of a molecule to figure out its chemical composition, but some scientists wondered whether the measuring method itself interfered with the molecule’s structure. It required putting the molecule on a salt crystal, but if no one knew the shape to begin with, they can’t know whether the salt affects the shape.

So it would be nice if you could just take a look at something and see it for yourself. This new method will allow that to happen — imaging viruses, DNA and molecules in real time.

The method uses optical near-field images, which has no diffraction limit, Li said. Near-field images are within the optical wavelength of the optics involved. Far field is beyond that distance.

“Therefore, theoretically, there is no limit on how small we can see. It will depend on how much can we amplify the image using the spheres and relay it to the far field,” Li said.

The team's paper is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Printable food

Cornell Fabrication Lab Makes Edible Objects With 3-D Printer

By Clay DillowPosted 03.01.2011 at 5:46 pm29 Comments

Mmmm, Space Shuttle Cornell University/French Culinary Institute

Here at PopSci we often write about emerging technologies like 3-D printing, perhaps almost as often as we write about space launches and rocket ships. And every now and then the use ofhigh-tech gadgetry in the kitchen gives us reason to write about things like scallops and cheese. But until Cornell University teamed up with Dave Arnold and New York’s French Culinary Institute to create miniature scallop-and-cheese space shuttles using a specially equipped 3-D printer, we never thought we’d ever write about all three at the same time.

Cornell’s computational synthesis lab has created software tools that allow engineers to create edible objects using complex geometries that even a skilled chef would have a great deal of trouble creating by hand. A souped up 3-D printer allows creative culinary types to create pureed pastes of their ingredients that can then be layered onto one another via special extruding heads, much as conventional rapid prototyping machines print thin layers of plastics, metals, or glass.

So far the team has printed with all kinds of ingredients: cheese, chocolate, hummus, turkey, celery, scallops, etc. Which begs the question: if you could print anything out of, say, any two ingredients, what would you print? Feel free to get creative in the comments below.

Tech Central Today

Friday, June 29, 2012

Geek Gifts

11 cheap gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks

1. Aerogel

2. EcoSphere

3. Mars Rock

4. Gömböc

5. Violet Laser Pointer

6. Gallium

7. Miracle Berries

8. DNA Genotyping

9. Klein Bottle

10. Giant Plush Microbes

11. Ferrofluid

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World's Most Powerful Optical Microscope Lets Researchers See Inside Viruses

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Friday, June 29, 2012

Geek Gifts

11 cheap gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks

1. Aerogel

2. EcoSphere

3. Mars Rock

4. Gömböc

5. Violet Laser Pointer

6. Gallium

7. Miracle Berries

8. DNA Genotyping

9. Klein Bottle

10. Giant Plush Microbes

11. Ferrofluid

DVICE stories now rising on

Powerful microscope

World's Most Powerful Optical Microscope Lets Researchers See Inside Viruses

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Printable food

Cornell Fabrication Lab Makes Edible Objects With 3-D Printer