The DEW line was one of three radar early warning systems of the time. If you grew up in the middle of the Cold War, you probably remember hearing about the Distant Early Warning line between duck-and-cover drills. The United States and Canada built the DEW line radar stations throughout the Arctic to detect potential […]
For decades there has been this tantalizing idea being pitched of pulling CO2 out of the air and using the carbon molecules for something more useful, like making plastics. Although this is a fairly simple process, it is also remarkably inefficient. Recently Caltech researchers have managed to boost the efficiency somewhat with a new two-stage […]
For home HVAC systems, heat pumps seem to be the way of the future. When compared to electric heating they can be three to four times more efficient, and they don’t directly burn fossil fuels. They also have a leg up over standard air conditioning systems since they can provide both cooling and heating, and […]
Radio Shack, despite being gone for a number of years, is still in our cultural consciousness. But Tandy, the company behind Radio Shack for many years. Did you ever wonder how a leather company started in 1919, because, briefly, a computer giant? Or even an electronics retailer? [Abort Retry Fail] has the story in three […]
Fusion product against duration, showing the Lawson criterion progress. (Credit: Dinklage et al., 2024, MPI for Plasma Physics) In nuclear fusion, the triple product – also known as the Lawson criterion – defines the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction produces more power than is needed to sustain the fusion reaction. Recently the German […]
USB-C has enabled a lot of great things, most notably removing the no less than three attempts to plug in the cable correctly, but gone are the days of just 5V over those lines. [Meticulous Technologies] sent in their project to help easily identify what voltage your USB-C line is running at, the USB VSense. […]
Gone are the days when all smart devices were required an internet uplink. The WiFi-enabled IoT fad, while still upon us (no, my coffee scale doesn’t need to be on the network, dammit!) has begun to give way to low-power protocols actually designed for this kind of communication, such as ZigBee, and more recently, Thread. […]
We’ve just begun to receive entries to the One Hertz Challenge, but we already have an entry by [Mike Coats] that explicitly demands to be awarded last place: the Metronalmost, a metronome that will never, ever, tick at One Hertz. Unlike a real metronome that has to rely on worldly imperfections to potentially vary the […]
You would think detecting lightning would be easy. Each lightning bolt has a staggering amount of power, and, clearly, you can hear the results on any radio. But it is possible to optimize a simple receiver circuit to specifically pick up lightning. That’s exactly what [Wenzeltech] shows in a page with several types of lightning […]
After the fire and fury of liftoff, when a spacecraft is sailing silently through space, you could be forgiven for thinking the hard part of the mission is over. After all, riding what’s essentially a domesticated explosion up and out of Earth’s gravity well very nearly pushes physics and current material science to the breaking […]