Over the course of evolution microorganisms have evolved pathways to break down many materials. The challenge with the many materials that we humans have created over just the past decades is that we cannot wait for evolution to catch up, ergo we have to develop such pathways ourselves. One such example is demonstrated by [Nick […]
X-ray crystallography, like mass spectroscopy and nuclear spectroscopy, is an extremely useful material characterization technique that is unfortunately hard for amateurs to perform. The physical operation isn’t too complicated, however, and as [Farben-X] shows, it’s entirely possible to build an X-ray diffractometer if you’re willing to deal with high voltages, ancient X-ray tubes, and soft […]
The inside of this AF117 transistor can was a thriving whisker ecosystem. (Credit: Anthony Francis-Jones) AF114 germanium transistors and related ones like the AF115 through AF117 were quite popular during the 1960s, but they quickly developed a reputation for failure. This is due to what should have made them more reliable, namely the can shielding […]
People have been coming up with clever ways to bring light to the darkness since we lived in caves, so it’s no surprise we still love finding interesting ways to illuminate our world. [Michael] designed a simple, but beautiful, book lamp that’s easy to assemble yourself. This build really outshines its origins as an assembly […]
With immunotherapy increasingly making it out of the lab and into hospitals as a viable way to treat serious conditions like cancer, there’s a lot of pressure to optimize these therapies. This is especially true for therapies involving chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, which so far required a cumbersome process of extracting the patient’s […]
Some Mondays are worse than others, but April 28 2025 was particularly bad for millions of people in Spain and Portugal. Starting just after noon, a number of significant grid oscillations occurred which would worsen over the course of minutes until both countries were plunged into a blackout. After a first substation tripped, in the […]
The Ceran discs, freshly cut from the old stovetop and awaiting polishing. (Credit: Huygens Optics) Ceran is a name brand for a type of glass ceramic that has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). This is useful for stovetops, but it is also a highly desirable property for optical glass. The natural question: […]
Some of the largest objects in the night sky to view through a telescope are galaxies and supernova remnants, often many times larger in size than the moon but generally much less bright. Even so, they take up a mere fraction of the night sky, with even the largest planets in our solar system only […]
Time series of O2 (blue) and VGADM (red). (Credit: Weijia Kuang, Science Advances, 2025) In an Earth-sized take on the age-old ‘correlation or causality’ question, researchers have come across a fascinating match between Earth’s magnetic field and its oxygen levels since the Cambrian explosion, about 500 million years ago. The full results by [Weijia Kuang] […]
Currently the typical way that crude oil is processed involves a fractional distillation column, in which heated crude oil is separated into the various hydrocarbon compounds using distinct boiling points. This requires the addition of significant thermal energy and is thus fairly energy intensive. A possible alternative has been proposed by [Tae Hoon Lee] et […]