Fridaygram: Maker Camp, perfect mirror, space hygiene
By Scott Knaster, Google
Developers Blog Editor
Maker Camp is an online summer camp created for teens who want to make gadgets, software and
other cool stuff. Anyone can join
Maker
Camp, and it’s free. The folks at Maker Camp post a new project each weekday
morning, and each afternoon there’s a Hangout with experts who show how they make things.
Plus, there are Hangout “
field
trips” to places like
NASA Ames Research
Center.
The makers of Maker Camp say they want to embrace not only the spirit of DIY (do it yourself),
but also DIT (do it together), and their online community and Hangouts are designed to do just
that. Maker Camp started earlier this week and runs for 6 weeks. You can participate any day
by visiting the
Maker Camp page on
Google+ and joining the Maker Camp
Google+
Community.
Speaking of great projects, researchers have long been trying to create a mirror that reflects
all the light that reaches it without absorbing any – a so-called
perfect
mirror. Recently, scientists at
MIT
were studying
photonic
crystals when they discovered a way to get the crystal to reflect all the light from
a specific frequency of red light shined on it. This discovery could lead to more efficient
lasers and yet-unknown advances.
Finally, we turn (as we often do on Fridaygram) to space, where amazing things happen, but so
do mundane things, like astronauts having to wash their hair. This can be especially
problematic if you have long hair and you’re aboard the International Space Station, like
Astronaut Karen Nyberg. In
this
video, Astronaut Nyberg shows how she washes her long hair in zero gravity, where
you have to keep track of the water lest it float away from you.
Here’s an idea: future astronauts could look at themselves in perfect mirrors when
they wash their hair. That’s just the kind of out-of-the-box thinking you’ll get here on Fridaygram,
where we try to provide a respite from your week of coding by offering some fun nerdy
stuff.
