{"id":3537,"date":"2009-02-19T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T04:53:49","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-02-13T17:03:53","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T00:03:53","slug":"neocube","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/neocube\/","title":{"rendered":"NeoCube"},"content":{"rendered":"

My latest cool toy is the NeoCube, a 6x6x6 cube of 216 small neodymium-iron-boron magnetic spheres which can be arranged into an amazing assortment of geometrical and non-geometrical shapes. You can create various polyhedra, even Buckyballs, and all kinds of familiar shapes, too. It’s basically a 3D tangram on steroids. As fascinating as it is addictive. It is mesmerizing to rearrange the spheres. I carry mine in my pocket and will often spend around 45 minutes at a time just playing with it — at home listening to NPR or in the car waiting for my wife. A supreme time-waster!<\/p>\n

Warning: arranging the spheres into a cube is not as easy as it seems in the first video below. That is your first challenge.<\/p>\n

It’s not cheap, but if you try to buy the magnets yourself, it will cost much more. <\/p>\n

\"neocube3sm.jpg\"<\/form>\n

NOTE: I made a Buckyball as per these instructions<\/a> (scroll down). First you make pentagons and stick them together. It’s really amazing how they just snap into place as if they had a mind of their own. Then I made a compound version shown here<\/a>. I added a ball to the center of every pentagon and then used the remaining balls as a chain. The magnets are so powerful, the chain easily holds the weight of the entire ball, even as the ball rotates<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shapeshifting magnetic spheres<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3537"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10165,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions\/10165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}