Whether you're trying to keep warm or dull aches and pains, a heating pad can offer some soothing relief. Before you head to the store, open your dresser and cupboard, and you might find everything you need to make one yourself. All it takes is two pieces of cloth (or an old sock), any of a number of grains such as rice, oatmeal, or flax seed, and a tiny bit of sewing or cutting. The TipNut blog includes a number of ingredients you can throw in to make your DIY heating pad into a headache reliever or a fragrant relaxing helper. For someone just getting into the shoveling routine again, this sounds worth having on hand.

Last week we put out a call for the best do-it-yourself Halloween costumes lifehackers could come up with, complete with instructions and images. As usual, you did not disappoint. Submissions ranged from the ironically funny Blue Screen of Death to whippin' it good with Devo; all creative, all completely homemade. After the jump, a ghoulish gallery of horrifyingly hip creations.

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With just a couple yards of cloth, a staple gun, a wrench, and a screwdriver, you can give your bland office chairs a fast makeover. The decor nerds over at Design*Sponge have a quick tutorial on how to make a typical computer desk chair into something pretty snazzy. They say:

With no need for new foam or batting (we upholstered right over the old stuff), this turned out to be a super simple, super cheap way to dramatically improve our office decor.

Office Chair Upgrade [via Design*Sponge]

I couldn't let this one go unnoted (yes, I realise my inner Star Wars geek is showing). Our pals at Gizmodo found some Star Wars fans with enough DIY mojo to build their own *working* rocket-powered X-Wing fighter.

"After drawing the plans using CAD software, Andy's team and his friends at Polecat Aerospace (with the help of RMS Laser and Aerotech Consumer Aerospace) used laser cutting to make the pieces out of Baltic Birch wood."

The Giz boys in the states also drove out to the Californian desert to film the launch (and sad demise) of the X-Wing. Awesome. Will they make a Millenium Falcon next?

Rocket-Powered 2-Foot Long X-Wing Model Actually Flies

and

Video: The Rocket-Powered X-Wings Flight... and Death [Gizmodo]

Beer batteries create energy from bacteria that feed on waste water. The technical term for them is "microbial fuel cells" (MFCs), and they earned the nickname beer batteries because beer company Fosters has funded the development of MFCs in Australia that run on waste water produced by the beer-making process. The best part about beer batteries, though, is that you can make them at home, based on instructions developed by a high school student named Abbie Groff. She won an international science fair prize for her work. Image by Abbie Groff.

Apparently the tradition of great engineers not having college degrees goes back 2,500 years. Harvard classics researcher Mark Schiefsky has shown that many great technical innovations of antiquity, such as the balance and steelyard, were created by craftspeople with no theoretical training in mathematics. A steelyard is a balance with unequal arms, whose operation is based on ancient mathematician Archimedes' law of the lever. Schiefsky poo-poos the idea that you need a fancy law to make a steelyard, and in fact has proven that steelyards were in use long before Archimedes explained it.

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