Before you decide to click away, thinking we’re talking about some heart rate monitor that connects to a display using WiFi, wait! Pulse-Fi is a system that monitors heart rate using the WiFi signal itself as a measuring device. No sensor, no wires, and it works on people up to ten feet away. Researchers at […]
To say that neutrinos aren’t the easiest particles to study would be a bit of an understatement. Outside of dark matter, there’s not much in particle physics that is as slippery as the elusive “ghost particles” that are endlessly streaming through you and everything you own. That’s why its exciting news that JUNO is now […]
A fundamental difficulty of working with nanoparticles is that your objects of study are too small for an optical microscope to resolve, and thus measuring their size can be quite a challenge. Of course, if you have a scanning electron microscope, measuring particle size is straightforward. But for less well-equipped labs, a dynamic light scattering […]
Birds are pretty amazing creatures, and one of the most amazing things about them and their non-avian predecessors are feathers. Engineers and scientists are finding inspiration from them in surprising ways. The light weight and high strength of feathers has inspired those who look to soar the skies, dating back at least as far as […]
Neutrinos are exceedingly common in the Universe, with billions of them zipping around us throughout the day from a variety of sources. Due to their extremely low mass and no electric charge they barely ever interact with other particles, making these so-called ‘ghost particles’ very hard to detect. That said, when they do interact the […]
Radiation is a bad thing that we don’t want to be exposed to, or so the conventional wisdom goes. We’re most familiar with it in the context of industrial risks and the stories of nuclear disasters that threaten entire cities and contaminate local food chains. It’s certainly not something you’d want anywhere near your dinner, […]
Rubber! It starts out as a goopy material harvested from special trees, and is then processed into a resilient, flexible material used for innumerable important purposes. In the vast majority of applications, rubber is prized for its elasticity, which eventually goes away with repeated stress cycles, exposure to heat, and time. When a rubber part […]
Hackaday has a long-running series on Mining and Refining, that tracks elements of interest on the human-made road from rocks to riches. What author Dan Maloney doesn’t address in that series is the natural history that comes before the mine. You can’t just plunk down a copper mine or start squeezing oil from any old […]