NASA’s ACS3 (Advanced Composite Solar Sail System) is currently fully deployed in low Earth orbit, and stargazers can spot it if they know what to look for. It’s actually one of the brightest things in the night sky. When the conditions are right, anyway. ACS3’s sail is as thin as it is big. What conditions […]
It takes but an ill-fated second to break a bone, and several long weeks for it to heal in a cast. And even if you have one of those newfangled fiberglass casts, you still can’t get the thing wet, and it’s gonna be itchy under there because your skin can’t breathe. Isn’t it high time […]
When it comes to polarizing and confusing questions in electronics, wiring up shields is on the top-10 list when sorted by popularity. It’s a question most of us need to figure out at some point – when you place a USB socket symbol on your schematic, where do you wire up the SHIELD and MP […]
It’s time to talk about Microsoft’s patch Tuesday, and the odd vulnerability rollback that happened. CVE-2024-43491 has caught some attention, as it’s a 9.8 on the CVSS scale, is under active exploitation, and results in Remote Code Execution (RCE). Yikes, it sounds terrible! First off, what actually happened? The official statement is that “build version […]
After 47 years it’s little wonder that the hydrazine-powered thrusters of the Voyager 1, used to orient the spacecraft in such a way that its 3.7 meter (12 foot) diameter antenna always points back towards Earth, are getting somewhat clogged up. As a result, the team has now switched back to the thrusters which they […]
While plastics are very useful on their own, they can be much stronger when reinforced and mixed with a range of fibers. Not surprisingly, this includes the thermoplastic polymers which are commonly used with FDM 3D printing, such as polylactic acid (PLA) and polyamide (PA, also known as nylon). Although the most well-known fibers used […]
There was a time when building a telescope was a rite of passage for budding astronomers, much as building a radio was the coming age for electronics folks. These days, many things are cheaper to buy than build, even though we do enjoy building anything we can. Orion was a big name in telescopes for […]
The Bluetooth SIG recently released the core specification for version 6.0 of Bluetooth. Compared to 5.x, it contains a number of changes and some new features, the most interesting probably being Channel Sounding. This builds upon existing features found in Bluetooth 5.x to determine the angle to, and direction of another device using Angle of […]
[Thomas Roche] of NinjaLab is out with EUCLEAK, (pdf) a physical attack against Infineon security microcontrollers, and the security tokens that contain them. The name is a portmanteau of Euclidean and leak. And no surprise, it’s a data leak in some implementations of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm (EEA), a component of an Elliptical Curve Digital […]
As we slowly wean ourselves away from our centuries-long love affair with fossil fuels in an attempt to reduce CO2 emissions and combat global warming, there has been a rapid expansion across a broad range of clean energy technologies. Whether it’s a set of solar panels on your roof, a wind farm stretching across the […]