Collaborate Disseminate
For all of the semiconductor industry’s legendary reputation for cleanliness, the actual processes that go into making chips use some of the nastiest stuff imaginable. Silicon oxide is nothing but …read more Continue reading Big Chemistry: Hydrofluoric Acid
The news doesn’t go long without some kind of superconductor announcement these days. Unfortunately, these come in several categories: materials that require warmer temperatures than previous materials but still require …read more Continue reading Ask Hackaday: What If You Did Have a Room Temperature Superconductor?
There are many benefits to learning to fly an airplane, drive a racing car, or operate some complex piece of machinery. Ideally, you’d do so in a perfectly safe environment, …read more Continue reading Car Driving Simulators for Students, or: When Simulators Make Sense
Figuring out what the Earth’s climate is going to do at any given point is a difficult task. To know how it will react to given events, you need to …read more Continue reading Measuring Trees Via Satellite Actually Takes A Great Deal of Field Work
Humans are very good at anthropomorphising things. That is, giving them human characteristics, like ourselves. We do it with animals—see just about any cartoon—and we even do it with our …read more Continue reading Slime Mold-Powered Smart Watches See Humans Fall In Love With The Goo
When thoughts turn to the modernization and decarbonization of our transportation infrastructure, one imagines it to be dominated by exotic materials. EV motors and wind turbine generators need magnets made …read more Continue reading Electrical Steel: The Material at Heart of the Grid
About two decades ago there was a quiet revolution in electronics which went unnoticed by many, but which overturned a hundred years of accepted practice. You’d have noticed it if …read more Continue reading Parts We Miss: The Mains Transformer
Last week I was sitting in a waiting room when the news came across my phone that Ingenuity, the helicopter that NASA put on Mars three years ago, would fly …read more Continue reading In Defense of Anthropomorphizing Technology
When we first developed telescopes, we started using them on the ground. Humanity was yet to master powered flight, you see, to say nothing of going beyond into space. As …read more Continue reading They Want To Put A Telescope In A Crater On The Moon
As I walked into the huge high bay that was to be my part-time office for the next couple of years, I was greeted by all manner of abandoned equipment …read more Continue reading Arctic Adventures with a Data General Nova II — The Equipment