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 […]
There was a time when making a cloud chamber with dry ice and alcohol was one of those ‘rite of passage’ type science projects every nerdy child did. That time may or may not be passed, but we doubt many children are making cloud chambers quite like [Curious Scientist]’s 20 cm x 20 cm Peltier-powered […]
Humans have long admired the sound of birdsong, but to fully appreciate how technically amazing it is, you need an ultrasonic microphone. [Benn Jordan] recently created a video about using these microphones to analyze a collection of bird calls, even training a starling to repeat an image encoded in sound, and has some recommendations for […]
[Stoppi] always has interesting blog posts and videos, even when we don’t understand all the German in them. The latest? Computer simulation of wave propagation (Google Translate link), which, if nothing else, makes pretty pictures that work in any language. Check out the video below. Luckily, most browsers will translate for you these days, or […]