11 Christmas cheap gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks

Science Geeks will love these…

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.

---

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.

Go and Buy

---

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?

Go and Buy

---

 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.

Go and Buy – Click price > $70+

---

 4. Gömböc

Gömböc

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.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.

Go and Buy – Click 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. – Update,  they are affordable now!

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.

Go and Buy

---

miracle berry

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.

Go and Buy

DNA Genotyping

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.

Go and Buy – Click price > $100

Klein Bottle

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.

Go and Buy – Click price > $35

Giant Microbes Toy Plushies

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.

Go and Buy

Ferrofluid

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

• 
  

• 
  

Top 10 Clever Hacks for Things You Thought Were Trash

One man's trash is another man's treasure, and we've always been fond of finding MacGyver-like uses for anything and everything—right down to dryer lint and used candy wrappers.. Here are our top 10 favorite hacks for things you thought were headed to the garbage.

10. Make a Waterproof Fire Starter Out of Dryer Lint

For all the laundry we do in a week, we accumulate a massive amount of dryer lint. Wouldn't it be better off going toward something useful? Whether you're making an outdoor or indoor fire, you can always use a little help to get things started, and that dryer lint can help. Just throw the lint into a section of an egg carton, tie it up with dental floss, cover it in some old candle wax, and you've got yourself a waterproof fire starter for any occasion. It should last you about 15 minutes, more than enough to get a roaring fire going.

9. Make a Tablet Stylus Out of a Candy Wrapper

Steve Jobs may not approve of stylus usage, but sometimes you just need to let your inner artist out and a finger doesn't cut it. Instead of buying a stylus though, you can make one yourself out of an old pen and a used candy wrapper. If you want to go above and beyond, a bit of tissue paper or newspaper can make it all the better.

8. Turn Bread Tags Into Cord Labels

I dread the days when I have to reach behind my desk to move some cables around, since I can never figure out which one is which. Eliminate that annoyance by labeling your cables with old bread tags: just write down the device that each cord leads to and slap them on. You'll never have to run your hand through that bird's nest of cables ever again.

7. Turn a Plastic Bottle Into a Smartphone Bike Mount

While we recommend investing in a reusable water bottle, sometimes you just have to buy it bottled, and then you have one more piece of trash lying around. Instead of throwing it away, you can turn it into a rainproof bike mount for your smartphone—perfect for navigating you home and avoiding inclement weather. Alternatively, you could turn it into a lens cap for your camera, or an irrigation system for your garden to keep it watered while you're away from home.

6. Remove Bad Smells and Clean Windows with Newspaper

Old newspapers are good for more than just starting fire, and if you still haven't moved over to the digital edition of your favorite rag, you can use it as a household odor-killer. Just stuff it in drawers, refrigerators, shoes, or any other smelly place and it should clear that odor right up. Alternatively, you could turn it into an actual rag: newspaper is the perfect way to clean your windows with a streak-free shine.

5. Turn an Old Gift Card Into a Headphone Cable Wrapper

Once you've used up that gift card from Aunt Petunia, you don't have to toss it—with a few cuts here and there, it can make a great cable wrapper for your headphones. Of course, you can always use our beloved "devil horns" method if you don't have a gift card around, but the gift card can help keep them from unraveling.

4. Turn an Old Sock Into an MP3 Player-Holding Armband

If you've tried exercising with your smartphone or MP3 player, you know how much of a pain they can be bouncing around in your pocket or clipped onto your shorts. Clipping it on your arm really is the best way to go, and if you don't want to buy an armband, just cut the toe off an old sock and slide it up your arm. Then, fold the bottom half up to create a pocket for your device. It may not be quite as fancy as the store-bought model, but it's hard to beat the low price of $0.

3. Turn a Shampoo Bottle Into a Charging Station

We all have one or two devices we dump out of our pockets as soon as we get home, and what better place to put them than in the wall? With an old shampoo or lotion bottle, you can create a nice charging cradle for them that hangs right off the socket, so they aren't taking up space on the floor. Alternatively, you can take those old bottles and organize your cables on the wall, too.

2. Turn Toilet Paper Tubes Into Cable Organizers

We tech nerds amass tons of extra cables over time, and we're afraid to get rid of them for fear we might need them one day. The solution? Take all those toilet paper tubes you use up and turn them into an ugly but incredibly awesome cable organizer. It'll keep all your cables stored and labeled neatly, without tangles, all the while making use of your trash. You can also use them to just control your cable clutter of individual appliances, too.

1. Turn a Soda Can Into a Wi-Fi Extender

We're always looking for ways to improve our Wi-Fi signal, and if you aren't ready to give up and buy a new router, you can try extending your range with a soda can. Just cut it up and put it on your antenna, where it'll act as a parabolic reflector and enjoy Wi-Fi on the far side of your house. Plus, when you're done, you can hang pictures with the can's tabs, too.
Got any other clever tips for reusing your trash? Share them with us in the comments.

100 best website you must have to visit part-1 (merry christmas)

Here at Maximum PC, we've always done our fair share of website recommendation articles--including a couple of doozies from the past few years. And of course we're not the only ones who do this sort of article either; it's a proven popular format. But this year, we thought we'd mix things up a little bit. Rather than just focusing on what's services are popular, or which web apps will make you the most productive, we wanted to take a look at what's fun on the Internet.
In that spirit, our February cover feature is going to be 100 Websites You Need to Visit Before You Die. These are sites that will either entertain you, educate you, or just plain blow your mind. They're not the kind of website you put in your bookmarks bar and come back to again and again--they're the kind that you email to your friends along with a note that says "holy s*** check this out."
So today we've got the first 50 of our 100 Websites You Need to See Before You Die. Where are the other 50? That's where you come in. Once you've read our picks, let us know your own. We'll be picking 50 of the best user submissions to round out our list for the magazine. Anyone who's submission we pick will be in the running to win a whole bunch of awesome prizes (stay tuned tomorrow for full contest rules, prizes and limitations).
So, without further ado, here's the list:

We Choose the Moon 

Its name taken from John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 address to Rice University, We Choose the Moon is an interactive history exhibit from NASA, allowing you walk through the Apollo 11 Mission, stage by stage. Each stage has a CG visualization of the mission, as well as real audio from mission control and the astronauts themselves. If you’re a space buff and haven’t seen WeChooseTheMoon yet, you need to drop everything and check it out, stat.

Hotel 626

Commissioned to help sell Doritos (of all things), Hotel626 is a decidedly non-snack-related horror puzzle game, which challenges you to escape from a haunted hotel while solving challenges and avoiding an untimely demise. The puzzles aren’t going to thrill seasoned adventure gamers, but the overall production value is impressive, as is the novel use of elements like your webcam, microphone, and even your cell phone.
One thing though: you can only play the game at night. (If you’re sneaky, you might try changing your system clock to sometime after 6PM)

Incredibox 

Have you ever wanted to conduct your own miniature trip-hop orchestra of French hipster clones?
Wait, stop, don’t go yet. Actually check out Incredibox, it’s an awesomely-executed music creation web-app, which lets you create your own a capella groove by clicking and dragging different parts onto a lineup of cartoon Frenchmen.
Ok, it’s hard to explain—just try it out.

The Dionaea House

The Dionaea House is an example of “hyperfiction,” a story told through more than just a single running narrative. A bit like an alternate reality game minus the reader participation, “reading” The Dionaea House involves following a number of threads on different blogs and in comments. We won’t tell you anything about what The Dionaea House is actually about, because figuring that out is the fun part.

Ted’s Caving Page 

Older than the Dionaea house, and less intricately-constructed, Ted’s Caving Page is nonetheless a marvelously creepy example of how to tell a story well on the internet. Like the previous example, the less you know about Ted’s experience in the cave the better, but let’s just say that those who are claustrophobic or afraid of the dark might want to avoid this one.

Akinator 

When you were a kid, did you ever play 20 Questions? You know, where you think of a person, place, or thing, and then your friend gets to ask 20 yes-or-no questions to figure out what it is? Well, it turns out that 20 questions is one of those games, like chess and reversi, that’s better played by computers.
Think of any character at all, from a movie, tv show, game—anything. Then just answer Akinator’s questions to the best of your ability. No guarantees, but we think you’ll be impressed.

Record Tripping

Does your mouse have a scroll wheel on it? You’d better hope it does (and seriously, what decade are you living in if it doesn’t) because Record Tripping is a seriously cool, seriously inventive game that pairs wheel-turning puzzles, record scratching, and Alice in Wonderland. The whole thing’s played with just the scroll wheel and the left mouse button, so assuming you’ve got both of those, head on over.

State of the Union 

Sure, the annual State of the Union address might seem a little dry for an afternoon timekiller, but that’s exactly what they’ve done here, with data visualizations, statistical analysis, and searchable texts of every single address. History and politics have never been as addictive as this.

Personas

An experiment from MIT’s media lab, Personas takes your first and last name, scours the internet, then spits out a composite image of what it thinks you’re like, based on what it found about people with your name. Of course, unless you happen to have a completely unique name you’ll see data from lots of people other than yourself, but that’s sort of the point.

Soy Tu Aire 

Don’t let this page’s Spanish intro throw you for a loop, you don’t need to speak a word of it to appreciate the music and visuals contained here. Even if floating, lyrical melodies aren’t your thing, stick with it to check out how the “ink” cursor effect changes to reflect what’s going on in the song’s lyrics.
 

Shape the Hive

What are humans, really, but so many bees, buzzing away? That’s the question (we think) asked by Shape The Hive, a visual “experiment in digital collaboration.”
In more concrete terms, Shape The Hive is a massive, color-coded hex grid, where anyone can use a sort of virtual kaleidoscope to fill in hexes with distorted images or videos. It’s fun to have a look around, and easy if you’re inclined to participate, so have a look.

Get The Glass 

We’re not the biggest fans of blurring the line between advertisement and gaming, but we’re willing to make exceptions in two instances: 1) When it comes to frosty, delicious milk. 2) When the game in question is a beautifully imagined and well thought-out virtual board game, with graphics that still look amazing three years after the fact.
And what do you know—Get The Glass succeeds on both of those counts! It’s almost like we planned it that way.

The Wilderness Downtown 

The Wilderness Downtown is a collaboration between Arcade Fire, director Chris Milk, and Google that uses the media capabilities of HTML 5 to create an internet music video that’s personalized to the viewer. Even if you’re not a fan of the music, it’s worth checking out as a technology demo for HTML 5 from some of the crack engineers at Google.

False.jp

What we have here is a collection of simple visualizations (most respond only to the movement of your mouse cursor, and the left mouse button) from a Japanese graphic designer. You won’t find any deep content on this page, but we suspect these mesmerizing visualizations will keep you entertained for longer than you’d like to admit.

Pretty Loaded 

Adobe (née Macromedia) Flash technology has allowed for a boom of rich media on the web, but it’s brought its share of problems as well. One such problem is the vile loading period, keeping you from enjoying your web content or video game. Thankfully, some designers realize that it’s important to keep users engaged during this period, and have elevated the preloader progress bar to an art form. PrettyLoaded celebrates these unsung heroes of web development, showcasing the very best of preloaders from around the web.

HubbleSite

Sometimes, you need to be reminded that—no matter how big your personal problems might seem—you’re just an insignificant mote in an unfathomably large universe. Other times, you just want to see kick-ass images from the most righteous piece of optics we’ve ever blasted into the cosmos. In either case, hubblesite.org has you covered.

We Feel Fine 

Say what you will about the touchy-feely sentiment behind WeFeelFine, the site is an interesting technological experiment in extracting data from the far-flung corners of the internet. Just click the big pink heart for a swirling, up-to-the-minute graph of how everybody’s feeling on the internet. Click a particle to read the sentence in question, and click the question to visit the blog it came from.

Line Rider 

For some, Line Rider is a canvas. For others, it’s a way of life. But for most, Line Ride is just a flash game—where you draw out a course for a little sledder guy to ride on.  It’s a kick, and something everyone should try, if for no other reason than to understand the effort it takes to make the kind of Line Rider videos that get passed around on sites like Reddit and Digg.

EyezMaze

EyezMaze may not sound familiar to you, but if you’re a fan of browser games you’ve probably played on of their internet-famous GROW series. If you haven’t, you should check them out right away. The basic conceit is this: You have to place a set number of elements into a scene, in a certain order. The order matters, so you have to follow the clues in the impossibly-charming animations to figure out the optimal order and win the game. We recommend you start with GROW v.3

Anasomnia 

The first thing that’s amazing about Anasomnia: The densely-packed, surreal dreamscape animations that only play when the lights in your room are out (although you can trick it if you cover up your webcam with your hand).
The second thing that’s amazing about Anasomnia: Every dream is different. Through some sort of procedural generation trickery, Anasomnia will be a different show every time you turn your lights out.

BLU 

If you’re in the kind of mood to have your mind blown, allow us to suggest that you visit the website of the street-artist BLU. Street art like graffiti? Sort of, but in motion. Check out the “Video” tab on the BLU website for a collection of four stop-motion street animations that are as insane as they are long. To see the craziest one first, start with “Big Bang Big Boom.”

Mr. Wong’s Soup’Partments 

In another testament to the fact that nobody wastes time as spectacularly as hundreds of people wasting time together, Mr. Wong’s Soup’Parments is a collaborative pixel-art image of a tower—each individual floor drawn and submitted by a different person. The final product is the “tallest virtual tower in the world” and a great way to kill a few minutes. Prepare to wear out that scroll wheel!

Blue Ball Machine 

Another example of community-driven pixel art, the Blue Ball Machine consists of tiled animated gifs representing the Rube Goldberg-esque workings of a giant blue-ball-processing facility. Originally spawned as part of a challenge on the Something Awful forums, the original Blue Ball Machine image became a popular YTMND site, and spawned a number of follow-ups.

The Million Dollar Homepage

The Million Dollar Homepage contains only a single image. That image is a giant, ugly, expensive advertisement. And that giant, ugly advertisement made some college kid in the UK one MILLION dollars.
The idea is simple: Create a 1,000,000 pixel image, and sell those pixels off for a dollar each (in blocks of 100). People are free to use those pixels to link to advertise whatever they want (online casinos and scams mostly, it seems). Every single pixel sold out, and Alex Tew of Wilshire England made a cool milli. How could he make so much off of something so dumb? Because he thought of it first

80 Gigapixel London 

It can be hard to keep up with who’s currently winning the “world’s largest photo” race, but right now the king is this360-degree panorama of London. Clocking in at 80 Gigapixels (that’s 8,000 times the resolution of your average point-n-shoot camera, for reference) this panaroma is detailed enough to read the license plate on a faraway bus.

Waybackmachine 

Another piece of internet history (both itself, and as a tool for exploring internet history) is the Wayback Machine. Simply put, the Wayback Machine will take any URL, and create a gallery of historical versions of that website for you to explore. Check out some of your favorite websites, and marvel at how far we’ve come in just 5 or 10 years.

Cleverbot 

You can’t call yourself a true connoisseur of internet curios until you’ve attempted to have a full-fledged conversation with a chatbot. People have been trying to make convincing Chatbots since the 70s, and even though we’re still far from something that’ll pass the Turing Test, it can be a real kick to try talking to one of these. Like it’s predecessor Jaberwocky, Cleverbot learns more with each conversation it has.
After you’ve fooled around for a while, check out the “cleverness” section for a collection of funny or impressive conversations between Chatbot and other people.

Rules For My Unborn Son 

We don’t have a whole lot of blogs on this list because—by their very nature—they’re not really a single-serving kind of thing. All the same, Rules For My Unborn Son’s been getting regularly updated for long enough that pretty much anyone can get a healthy dose of awesome advice just by spending an hour or two paging through the archives.

Demoscene.tv 

If you’re not familiar with the demoscene, here’s what you need to know: there’s a subset of computer programs, musicians and artists who engage in competitions to fit the most impressive and extravagant visual displays (and sometimes even games) into teeny-tiny chunks of script. We’re talking whole music videos crammed down into 64K or smaller. At Demoscene.tv, you can get a feel for what the demoscene is all about without having to run any strange code on your computer—all the demos are streamed, a la YouTube.

Perry Bible Fellowship

One of the few truly classic webcomics, The Perry Bible Fellowship is a pitch-perfect mixture of whimsical art, extra-dark humor and good, old-fashioned surrealism. The author Nicholas Gurewitch still updates sporadically, but you can absorb the whole archive in one sitting (if you’ve got an afternoon to spare).