Just wanted to share this neat resource for scientific supplies. We often look for things in Edmund Scientific but for all the truly wild and fun check out American Science & Surplus!

Where else can you get things like:

Bacon Bandages!
Mend it with these bacon bandages. Or use them to patch ordinary cuts and scrapes with a bandage strip that you won’t see on every other klutz in the office or kid in the classroom. Our each is an old-fashioned metal tin of (15) 3″ bandage strips, each of which mimics a small slice of bacon. BONUS: A few of them end to end would make quite realistically disgusting scars for those costume parties. ADDED BONUS: A free tiny pink plastic pig in every box!
92725 BACON BANDAGES $4.95 / EACH Buy It!

Microscope
No, it’s never been in jail. But it could have helped crack a lot of cases using forensic evidence. Top-quality binocular microscope for advanced medical and biological research. Magnification is 60 to 1500X achieved with (4) standard achromatic objectives, 4X, 10X, 40X and 100X (the last being oil immersible, and the last two spring loaded.) Eyepieces are 10X wide field. The standard binocular head it comes with provides an additional 1.5X magnification, diopter and interpupillary adjustment. All lenses are multicoated. Includes coarse and fine focusing, large mechanical stage, and built-in halogen illuminator with abbe condenser, iris diaphragm and filter holder (two filters included). This is a superb product available to you at an excellent price. Made in Russia. As a special extra, we offer the monocular head below which is fully Interchangeable with the binocular head. Limited Lifetime Warranty. Please contact our tech. department for extensive info on the phase contrast and the photo attachment.
90197 BIOCON MICROSCOPE $595.00/EACH Buy it!
27600 MONOCULAR HEAD $12.50/EACH Buy it!
14385 PHASE CONTRAST UPGRADE $449.00/EACH Buy it!
14386 PHOTO ATTACHMENT $425.00/EACH Buy it!

Dichroic Wow!
Here’s an amazing, top quality dichroic optical assembly at a fantastic price for those who know what to do with it or its parts. White light entering one end splits chromatically and emerges from the other with virtually no loss of intensity. The assembly includes an iris, a dichroic wheel with two color filters, an infrared filter mirror, and a rectangular quartz prism all assembled around a 60 mm aspheric lens. The whole thing would fit into a 7″ x 7″ x 9-1/2″ box. It has got to have applications in the physics classroom for demo purposes, perhaps in the lab, too. We are guessing someone paid hundreds of dollars to have these dudes made.
29649
DICHROIC ASSEMBLY
$35.00 / EACH
Buy It!

Gear & Pinion
Talk about a heavy-duty set of straight-bevel gears! This is a takeout from an outboard motor. The set is made to work at a 90° offset angle, with a reduction ratio of slightly under 2:1. The gear is 5-5/8″ OD, 1-1/4″ ID. The pinion is 3-1/4″ OD, 1-1/4″ ID. Heavy. Nice.
33723 GEAR/PINION $12.50 / EACH Buy it!

Just wanted to share this neat resource for scientific supplies. We often look for things in Edmund Scientific but for all the truly wild and fun check out American Science & Surplus!

Where else can you get things like:

Bacon Bandages!
Mend it with these bacon bandages. Or use them to patch ordinary cuts and scrapes with a bandage strip that you won’t see on every other klutz in the office or kid in the classroom. Our each is an old-fashioned metal tin of (15) 3″ bandage strips, each of which mimics a small slice of bacon. BONUS: A few of them end to end would make quite realistically disgusting scars for those costume parties. ADDED BONUS: A free tiny pink plastic pig in every box!
92725 BACON BANDAGES $4.95 / EACH Buy It!

Microscope
No, it’s never been in jail. But it could have helped crack a lot of cases using forensic evidence. Top-quality binocular microscope for advanced medical and biological research. Magnification is 60 to 1500X achieved with (4) standard achromatic objectives, 4X, 10X, 40X and 100X (the last being oil immersible, and the last two spring loaded.) Eyepieces are 10X wide field. The standard binocular head it comes with provides an additional 1.5X magnification, diopter and interpupillary adjustment. All lenses are multicoated. Includes coarse and fine focusing, large mechanical stage, and built-in halogen illuminator with abbe condenser, iris diaphragm and filter holder (two filters included). This is a superb product available to you at an excellent price. Made in Russia. As a special extra, we offer the monocular head below which is fully Interchangeable with the binocular head. Limited Lifetime Warranty. Please contact our tech. department for extensive info on the phase contrast and the photo attachment.
90197 BIOCON MICROSCOPE $595.00/EACH Buy it!
27600 MONOCULAR HEAD $12.50/EACH Buy it!
14385 PHASE CONTRAST UPGRADE $449.00/EACH Buy it!
14386 PHOTO ATTACHMENT $425.00/EACH Buy it!

Dichroic Wow!
Here’s an amazing, top quality dichroic optical assembly at a fantastic price for those who know what to do with it or its parts. White light entering one end splits chromatically and emerges from the other with virtually no loss of intensity. The assembly includes an iris, a dichroic wheel with two color filters, an infrared filter mirror, and a rectangular quartz prism all assembled around a 60 mm aspheric lens. The whole thing would fit into a 7″ x 7″ x 9-1/2″ box. It has got to have applications in the physics classroom for demo purposes, perhaps in the lab, too. We are guessing someone paid hundreds of dollars to have these dudes made.
29649
DICHROIC ASSEMBLY
$35.00 / EACH
Buy It!

Gear & Pinion
Talk about a heavy-duty set of straight-bevel gears! This is a takeout from an outboard motor. The set is made to work at a 90° offset angle, with a reduction ratio of slightly under 2:1. The gear is 5-5/8″ OD, 1-1/4″ ID. The pinion is 3-1/4″ OD, 1-1/4″ ID. Heavy. Nice.
33723 GEAR/PINION $12.50 / EACH Buy it!

These amazing images are to-scale watercolor illustrations of a bacterium and blood cells. These are small sections of a larger piece made by Dr. David Goodsell. Notes on this work say

Macrophages circulate through the blood, searching for bacterial infection. When bacteria are found, macrophages engulf and digest them. This series of three paintings shows a macrophage engulfing a bacterium. Only a portion of the two cells, where a pseudopod of the macrophage is extending over the bacterium, is shown. The original paintings are 1 meter tall–at this magnification, the macrophage would fill most of a building.

David S. Goodsell is someone I admire deeply for his ability to illustrate Cell Biology (my favorite part of the life sciences, cant help the bias).

He is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He is the author of Bionanotechnology: Lessons from Nature (J. Wiley and Sons, 2004), Our Molecular Nature: The Body’s Motors, Machines, and Messages (Springer-Verlag, 1996), and The Machinery of Life (Springer-Verlag, 1993). His recent biomolecular artwork can be viewed here. Address: Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037. Internet: goodsell@scripps.edu (I got this blurb from here)

Read about his scientific interests here.

Read about his artistic work here.

A nice online presentation he has on Overview of Biological Machines from the Designing Nanostructures: A tutorial site can be found here. And you can pull up a nice slide presentation here.

Here is a lovely poster on Molecular Machinery (PDF 5MB)

These amazing images are to-scale watercolor illustrations of a bacterium and blood cells. These are small sections of a larger piece made by Dr. David Goodsell. Notes on this work say

Macrophages circulate through the blood, searching for bacterial infection. When bacteria are found, macrophages engulf and digest them. This series of three paintings shows a macrophage engulfing a bacterium. Only a portion of the two cells, where a pseudopod of the macrophage is extending over the bacterium, is shown. The original paintings are 1 meter tall–at this magnification, the macrophage would fill most of a building.

David S. Goodsell is someone I admire deeply for his ability to illustrate Cell Biology (my favorite part of the life sciences, cant help the bias).

He is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He is the author of Bionanotechnology: Lessons from Nature (J. Wiley and Sons, 2004), Our Molecular Nature: The Body’s Motors, Machines, and Messages (Springer-Verlag, 1996), and The Machinery of Life (Springer-Verlag, 1993). His recent biomolecular artwork can be viewed here. Address: Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037. Internet: goodsell@scripps.edu (I got this blurb from here)

Read about his scientific interests here.

Read about his artistic work here.

A nice online presentation he has on Overview of Biological Machines from the Designing Nanostructures: A tutorial site can be found here. And you can pull up a nice slide presentation here.

Here is a lovely poster on Molecular Machinery (PDF 5MB)

Snow on 10-26-05, originally uploaded by nikaboyce.

Mother nature has decided that it shall snow on the 26th of October in centeral MA!

Snow on 10-26-05, originally uploaded by nikaboyce.

Mother nature has decided that it shall snow on the 26th of October in centeral MA!

It occurs to me that raising and living with your children (especially for homeschooling families), if done well, is a bit like the Tibetan Buddhist Sand Mandala ritual. link link

(Learn more about this and the Tibetan Buddhist monks who travel the world to bring compassionate and beautiful Tibetan Buddhism to those of us who cant go to Tibet.) (super cool video of the process!)

Tibetan Buddhist monks train for weeks and months, meditating on a certain message and “type” of Buddha to “bring to life” in a mandala sand painting. They then render the mandala on a board with tubes that guide the sand into patterns. In earlier times, Tibetan Monks used ground precious stones like rubies, sapphires, and pearls. Other monks are chanting prayers so that, as the ritual of making the mandala proceeds, the Compassionate Intention emanates into the neighboring world. At the end of the ritual, the sand is scattered, collected, small amounts given to people watching and also used to bless nearby rivers and other things which need to be purified by Compassionate Intension and Love. (The whole world in my view).

How is this like raising kids? Do I really have to answer?! Each child is a beautiful and infinite possibility matrix who, with our love and compassion and teaching, manifests in the world all of the goodness and right that flows from ourselves. Their complexity makes them unique in every way and that complexity should be honored, celebrated, seen, allowed to grow, and allowed to be as colorful as possible. The sand of our children is exquisitely precious, way beyond ground pearls and rubies.

But most beautiful and grand is that our little human madalas are not blown apart but must be allowed to exist on their own, freed to affect the world in wonderful and unpredictable ways.

It occurs to me that raising and living with your children (especially for homeschooling families), if done well, is a bit like the Tibetan Buddhist Sand Mandala ritual. link link

(Learn more about this and the Tibetan Buddhist monks who travel the world to bring compassionate and beautiful Tibetan Buddhism to those of us who cant go to Tibet.) (super cool video of the process!)

Tibetan Buddhist monks train for weeks and months, meditating on a certain message and “type” of Buddha to “bring to life” in a mandala sand painting. They then render the mandala on a board with tubes that guide the sand into patterns. In earlier times, Tibetan Monks used ground precious stones like rubies, sapphires, and pearls. Other monks are chanting prayers so that, as the ritual of making the mandala proceeds, the Compassionate Intention emanates into the neighboring world. At the end of the ritual, the sand is scattered, collected, small amounts given to people watching and also used to bless nearby rivers and other things which need to be purified by Compassionate Intension and Love. (The whole world in my view).

How is this like raising kids? Do I really have to answer?! Each child is a beautiful and infinite possibility matrix who, with our love and compassion and teaching, manifests in the world all of the goodness and right that flows from ourselves. Their complexity makes them unique in every way and that complexity should be honored, celebrated, seen, allowed to grow, and allowed to be as colorful as possible. The sand of our children is exquisitely precious, way beyond ground pearls and rubies.

But most beautiful and grand is that our little human madalas are not blown apart but must be allowed to exist on their own, freed to affect the world in wonderful and unpredictable ways.

Q and her dad have been invited to go into the 5th grade computer class today to teach them and the computer teacher about this amazing software Q uses to explore the universe. (Did you catch that? A homeschooling student and parent invited into the school to teach).

This opensource software is called Celestia and can be found at this site: LINK HERE.

The front page says this:

Welcome to Celestia
… The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Here are somescreen shots from this program.

Remember that ALL of these images below are generated within the Celestia program.

A closeup of the space shuttle Discovery in orbit over Florida; this shot demonstrates Celestia’s virtual texture feature for extremely high resolution mapping of planets.

The 1989 flyby of Neptune by Voyager 2–last stop before leaving the solar system.

Q and her dad have been invited to go into the 5th grade computer class today to teach them and the computer teacher about this amazing software Q uses to explore the universe. (Did you catch that? A homeschooling student and parent invited into the school to teach).

This opensource software is called Celestia and can be found at this site: LINK HERE.

The front page says this:

Welcome to Celestia
… The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Here are somescreen shots from this program.

Remember that ALL of these images below are generated within the Celestia program.

A closeup of the space shuttle Discovery in orbit over Florida; this shot demonstrates Celestia’s virtual texture feature for extremely high resolution mapping of planets.

The 1989 flyby of Neptune by Voyager 2–last stop before leaving the solar system.