China played host to what, presumably, was the world’s first robot and human half-marathon. You can check out the action and the Tiangong Ultra robot that won in the video below. The event took place in Beijing and spanned 21.1 km. There was, however, a barrier between lanes for humans and machines. The human rules […]
Entry-level oscilloscopes are a great way to get some low-cost instrumentation on a test bench, whether it’s for a garage lab or a schoolroom. But the cheapest ones are often cheap for a reason, and even though they work well for the price they won’t stand up to more advanced equipment. But missing features don’t […]
Although uranium-235 is the typical fuel for commercial fission reactors on account of it being fissile, it’s relatively rare relative to the fertile U-238 and thorium (Th-232). Using either of these fertile isotopes to breed new fuel from is thus an attractive proposition. Despite this, only India and China have a strong focus on using […]
The sky is falling. Or more specifically, it was about to fall, according to the security community this week. The MITRE Corporation came within a hair’s breadth of running out of its contract to maintain the CVE database. And admittedly, it would be a bad thing if we suddenly lost updates to the central CVE […]
Spectroscopy seems simple: split a beam of light into its constituent wavelengths with a prism or diffraction grating, and measure the intensity of each wavelength. The devil is in the details, though, and what looks simple is often much harder to pull of in practice. You’ll find lots of details in [Gary Boyd]’s write-up of […]
GPS and similar satellite navigation systems revolutionized how you keep track of where you are and what time it is. However, it isn’t without its problems. For one, it generally doesn’t work very well indoors or in certain geographic or weather scenarios. It can be spoofed. Presumably, a real or virtual attack could take the […]
AI continues to be used in new and exciting ways… like generating spam messages. Yes, it was inevitable, but we now have spammers using LLM to generate unique messages that don’t register as spam. AkiraBot is a Python-powered tool, designed to evade CAPTCHAs, and post sketchy SEO advertisements to web forms and chat boxes around […]
It’s likely that among the readers of this article there will be many who collect something. Whether it’s rare early LEDs or first-year-of-manufacture microprocessors, you’ll scour the internet to find them, and eagerly await mystery packages from the other side of the world. There’s a tale emerging from Australia featuring just such a collector, whose […]
Meet the little board that could: [alcor6502]’s tiny USB relay controller, now evolved into a multifunction marvel. Originally built as a simple USB relay to probe the boundaries of JLCPCB’s production chops, it has become a compact utility belt for any hacker’s desk drawer. Not only has [alcor6502] actually built the thing, he even provided […]