Day: March 1, 2025

This week, I had to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time: make myself a custom PCB the old-fashioned way, with laser toner and etchant. The reason? I bought a horrible K40 laser cutter, and the motion controller doesn’t seem to be able to do acceleration control, which means the machine rams […]
Money, status, or even survival – there’s no shortage of incentives for faking results in the scientific community. What can we do to prevent it, or at least make it noticeable? One possible solution is cryptographic signing of measurement results. Here’s a proof-of-concept from [Clement Heyd] and [Arbion Halili]. They took a ThermoFisher Scientific 7500 […]
Nerf blasters typically fire small foam darts or little foam balls. [Michael Pick] wanted to build something altogether more devastating. To that end, he created a rocket launcher with an advanced air burst capability, intended to take out enemies behind cover. Unlike Nerf’s own rocket launchers, this build doesn’t just launch a bigger foam dart. […]
Nickel contamination can render soils infertile at levels that are currently impractical to treat. Researchers at UMass Amherst are looking at how plants can help these soils and source nickel for the growing EV market. Phytoremediation is the use of plants that preferentially hyperaccumulate certain contaminants to clean the soil. When those contaminants are also […]
LEGO! It’s a fun toy that is popular around the world. What you may not realize is that it’s also made to incredibly high standards. As it turns out, the humble building blocks are good enough to build a interferometer if you’re so inclined to want one. [Kyra Cole] shows us how it’s done. The […]
River tables are something we’ve heard decried as a passé, but we’re still seeing some interesting variations on the technique. Take this example done with bronze instead of epoxy. Starting with two beautiful slabs of walnut, [Burls Art] decided that instead of cutting them up to make guitars he would turn his attention to a […]
If you’ve ever seen those cheap LED fiber optic wands at the dollar store, you’ve probably just thought of them as a simple novelty. However, as [Ancient] shows us, you can turn them into a surprisingly nifty little display if you’re so inclined. The build starts by removing the fiber optic bundle from the wand. […]
Fluid simulations are a key tool in fields from aerospace to motorsports and even civil engineering. They can be three-dimensional and complicated and often run on supercomputer clusters bigger than your house. However, you can also do simple two-dimensional fluid simulations on very simple hardware, as [mircemk] demonstrates. This build is almost like a simple […]