With the availability of increasingly cheaper equipment, welding has become far more accessible these days. While this is definitely a plus, it also comes with the elephant-sized asterisk that as with any tool you absolutely must take into account basic safety precautions for yourself and others. This extends to the way you prepare metal for […]
Look inside a science fiction computer, and you’ll probably see tubes and cubes that emit light. Of course, it’s for effect, but the truth is, people do think light computing may be the final frontier of classical computing power. Engineers at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are […]
Although metal alloys is not among the most exciting topics for most people, the moment you add the word ‘radioactive’, it does tend to get their attention. So too with the once fairly common Mag-Thor alloys that combine magnesium with thorium, along with other elements, including zinc and aluminium. Its primary use is in aerospace […]
One swol mealworm amidst its weaker brethren. (Credit: The Thought Emporium, YouTube) Have you ever found yourself looking at the insects of the Paleozoic era, including the dragonfly Meganeuropsis permiana with its 71 cm wingspan and wondered what it would be like to have one as a pet? If so, you’re in luck because the […]
If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old computers, you’ll think they took up a full room. But if you ask, you’ll often find that the power supply was in another room and the cooling system was in yet another. So when you get a […]
Recently the MagQuest competition on improving the measuring of the Earth’s magnetic field announced that the contestants in the final phase have now moved on to launching their satellites within the near future. The goal here is to create a much improved World Magnetic Model (WMM), which is used by the World Geodetic System (WGS). […]
It’s relatively easy to understand how optical microscopes work at low magnifications: one lens magnifies an image, the next magnifies the already-magnified image, and so on until it reaches the eye or sensor. At high magnifications, however, that model starts to fail when the feature size of the specimen nears the optical system’s diffraction limit. […]
The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes. Strictly speaking, we’ve already seen one: sulfide melt deposits are associated with flood basalts and meteorite impacts, which absolutely are happening on-surface. They’re totally […]
Acid rain sucks, particularly if you run a fancy university with lots of lovely statues outside. If you’d like to try and predict when it’s going to occur, you might like this project from [Mohammad Nihal]. When rain is particularly acidic, it’s usually because of the combination of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen dioxide and moisture […]
Rolling two six-sided dice (2d6) gives results from 2 to 12 with a bell curve distribution. Seven being the most common result, two and twelve being the least common. But what if one could do this with a single die? This eleven-sided die has a distribution matching the results of 2d6. As part of research […]