Thursday Reading List (12/08/2011)

Zoobombing

The US city of Portland in Oregon is home to a unique weekly cycling event known as zoobombing. Take a look at this BBC news story.

How to make a Carbon Fiber Violin

Carbon fiber is used in many sporting applications from tennis rackets to nearly every component for high end bicycles. Now a Do-It-Yourself enthusiast from Australia has created a violin made of carbon fiber.  The complete details on making the violin can found  at Instructables,  a website dedicated to DIY builder plans. The violin is a painstaking 10 month project and is entered in the Instructables ShopBot Challenge. The winner will receive a CNC router machine, aka ShopBot.  Do you have a DIY project you would like to show off? Contest entry is open into February.

In a somewhat related story, Dr. Steven Sirr has performed CT scans on a 307 year-old Stradivarius violin. Sirr says he “was amazed at the anatomy.” He took the CT info and created a wooden violin. Since carbon fiber can be layered into nearly any shape, I can’t help but wonder about the resulting violin if the carbon fiber builder was to join forces with Dr. Steven Sirr.

Indonesian chocolate factory is world’s largest commercial bamboo structure

From a World Architecture News story, “With a tensile strength higher than mild steel and greater compressive strength than many mixtures of concrete it is no wonder that bamboo continues to be the construction material of choice for many longstanding building projects.

Few are quite as ambitious with the material as Big Tree Farms however, who have recently completed the largest bamboo structure in Southeast Asia in Sibang, Bali. ”

Researchers Develop World’s Lightest Material

A team of researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have developed the world’s lightest material – about one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam. Their findings appear in the Nov. 18 issue of Science.

This is a weekly digest of web links I think are worth checking out. Please comment on what you find interesting. If you have something to share, please submit links of interest to mike@kineticshift.com.