Many substances display crystallization, allowing them to keep adding to a basic shape to reach pretty humongous proportions. Although we usually tend to think of pretty stones that get fashioned into jewelry or put up for display, sugar also crystallizes and thus you can create pretty large sugar crystals. How to do this is demonstrated […]
Platinum-group metals (PGMs) are great catalysts, but they’re also great investments — in the sense that they are very, very expensive. Just ask the guy nicking car exhausts in the Walmart parking lot. If one could replace PGMs with a more common element, like, say the aluminum that makes up over 8% the mass of […]
Liquid nitrogen isn’t exactly an everyday material, but it’s acquired conveniently enough to be used in extreme overclocking experiments, classroom demonstrations, chemistry and physics experiments, and a number of other niche applications. Liquid oxygen, by contrast, is dangerous enough that it’s only really used in rocket engines. Nevertheless, [Electron Impressions] made some of his own, […]
Let’s face it; remembering a bunch of passwords is the pits, and it’s just getting worse as time goes on. These days, you really ought to have a securely-generated key-smash password for everything. And at that point you need a password manager, but you still have to remember the password for that. Well, Motorola is […]
Earlier this year Donut Lab caused quite the furore when they unveiled what they claimed was the world’s first production-ready solid state battery, featuring some pretty stellar specifications. Since then many experts and enthusiasts in the battery space have raised concerns that this claimed battery may not be real, or even possible at all. After […]
Nitrous oxide’s high-speed abilities don’t end with racing cars, as it’s a powerful enough oxidizer to be a practical component of rocket propellant. Since [Markus Bindhammer] is building a hybrid rocket engine, in his most recent video he built and tested a convenient nitrous oxide dispenser. The most commercially available form of nitrous oxide is […]
By far, the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world is caffeine. It’s farmed around the world in virtually every place that it has cropped up, most commonly on coffee plants, tea plants, and cocoa plants. But is also found in other less common plants like the yaupon holly in the southeastern United States […]
A friend of mine and I both have a similar project in mind, the manufacture of custom footwear with our hackerspace’s shiny new multi-material 3D printer. It seems like a match made in heaven, a machine that can seamlessly integrate components made with widely differing materials into a complex three-dimensional structure. As is so often […]
Halloween is about tricks and treats, but who wouldn’t fancy a bit to drink with that? [John Sutley] decided to complete his Halloween party with a drink dispenser looking as though it was dumped by a backstreet laboratory. It’s not only an impressive looking separating funnel, it even runs on an Arduino. The setup combines […]
Fungi make up a massive, interconnected part of Earth’s ecosystems, yet they’re vastly underrepresented in research and public consciousness compared to plants and animals. That may change in the future though, as a group of researchers at The Ohio State University have found a way to use fungi as organic memristors — hinting at a […]