If you are a schoolkid of the right age, you can’t wait to lose a baby tooth. In many cultures, there is a ritual surrounding it, like the tooth fairy, a mouse who trades your tooth for a gift, or burying the tooth somewhere significant. But in 1958, a husband and wife team of physicians […]
[Big Clive] picked up a tiny heater for less than £8 from the usual sources. Would you be shocked to learn that its heating capacity wasn’t as advertised? No, we weren’t either. But [Clive] treats us to his usual fun teardown and analysis in the video below. A simple test shows that the heater drew […]
It’s been twenty-three years since the day Phoenix was released, the web browser that eventually became Firefox. I downloaded it on the first day and installed it on my trusty HP Omnibook 800 laptop, and until this year I’ve used it ever since. Yet after all this time, I’m ready to abandon it for another […]
Python has become one of the most popular programming languages out there, particularly for beginners and those new to the hacker/maker world. Unfortunately, while it’s easy to get something up and running in Python, it’s performance compared to other languages is generally lacking. Often, when starting out, we’re just happy to have our code run […]
Intel’s 386 CPU is notable for being its first x86 CPU to use so-called standard cell logic, which swapped the taping out of individual transistors with wiring up standardized functional blocks. This way you only have to define specific gate types, latches and so on, after which a description of these blocks can be parsed […]
Apple was all-in on WiFi from the beginning, launching the AirPort line of products to much fanfare in 1999. In 2004, along came the AirPort Express—a fully-functional router the size of a laptop charger, that offered audio streaming to boot. As [schvabek] found out that while a lot of older Apple gear has long ago […]
We were as excited as anyone when MARSIS (the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) experiment announced there was possibly liquid water under the southern polar ice cap. If there is liquid water on Mars, it would make future exploration and colonization much more feasible. Unfortunately, SHARAD (the Shallow Radar) has a new […]
We’ve all owned something where one tiny detail drives us nuts: a blinding power LED, buttons in the wrong order, or a beep that could wake the dead. This beautifully documented project fixes exactly that kind of annoyance, only this time it’s the climate-controlled seats in a 2020 Ram 1500. [projectsinmotion] wasn’t satisfied with adjusting […]
When you think of ultrasonics, you probably think of a cleaner or maybe a toothbrush. If you are a Star Trek fan, maybe you think of knocking out crew members or showers. But there is another practical use of ultrasonics: cutting. By vibrating a blade at 40 kHz or so, you can get clean, precise […]
The cool part about science is that you can ask questions like what happens if you stick some moss spores on the outside of the International Space Station, and then get funding for answering said question. This was roughly the scope of the experiment that [Chang-hyun Maeng] and colleagues ran back in 2022, with their […]