Should that be “nite lite”? Yet another DIY project complete with color photos is availble from the OTHERPOWER website. The impetus for this experiment came from a student asking a science question of an expert at the Science for Kids forum at AllExperts. An incremental part of getting the hamster to glow (just kidding!) involves, of all things, a bicycle computer.

The experts explain that:

“The bicycle computer gives you an incredible amount of data for your project! It always shows you the speed of the hamster in miles or kilometers per hour. It remembers maximum speed, and keeps track of the total miles run by your rodent, with a resettable trip odometer too. The resettable timer shows you how many Hamster-Miles (hM) were run each night, and it will also compute the average speed maintained when the wheel is turning. “

OTHERPOWER must be a science fair competitor’s dream come true. Ostensibly the website owners are geeks gone wild, literally. They live in the mountains beyone the reach of phone or electric lines, generating energy by wind, water, and/or solar power alone. It isn’t clear if or how they manage to update their website from home, claiming to live 15 miles from the nearest utility pole. Can a cellular signal reach that far? Do satellite ISPs have uplinks yet? Maybe they have to take it to town.

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