Otona No Kagaku, or ‘Science for Adults’ is a ‘mook‘ (‘M’agazine + b’OOK’) series published by Gakken in Japan. Each issue has includes a kit that goes along with whatever the issues topic is. This one deals with heat engines and comes with a low temperature Stirling engine. The entire project took me about an hour to put together and it quite satisfying once you see it chugging away over a cup of hot water. This kit was bought from Karakuricorner, they have loads of the mooks there. If you know of anyone that likes science and can use a screw driver I would seriously think of buying one of these at a gift. And it’s not like the projects are lame either, you can make a pinhole camera, radio receivers from crystal to vacuum tube, microscopes, telescopes, and even a planetarium. I can only hope that one day I’ll be able to go into a book store of hobby shop here in the US and find kits of this quality and diversity. There may be some hope in this as I did notice that the pages of the mook are numbered from left to right. This would make translating the layout into English a lot simpler.
Translated version of the Otona no Kagaku web site
Stirling engine kit photoset on Flickr
(Otona no Kagaku group on Flickr)
As the big consumer holiday approaches we must prepare for the possible high tech gifts that we are about to receive, or at least hope to receive. If monitors are on your list you might want to familiarize yourself with the many Digital Visual Interface versions that are out there. Seems that you can’t get away with a handful of simple RCA cables these days.
I’m a big fan of Protopage mainly because I forget things. Think of it as your plastic homepage. Very versatile and flexible. There has been a new release that adds all sorts of new features to it like streaming video windows, DIY widgets, Flickr photo feeds, and an improved RSS reader. 
Don’t throw away those used metro cards and business cards! Make your very own fleet of paper airplanes from them. Heck, even post cards are fair game for your air force. Oh yeah, you don’t need to stick to fixed wing aircraft, you can build a 
Celebrate the holidays with your own movable paper Santa!