Collaborate Disseminate
It seems as though every week we see something that clearly shows we’re living in the future. The components we routinely incorporate into our projects would have seemed like science fiction only a few short years ago, but now we buy them online and have them shipped to us for …read more
Continue reading Plasma-Powered Thrusters For Your Homebrew Satellite Needs
Cancer is a crafty foe, not least because traces often remain after surgery and can trigger a relapse later on. Now a new technology to fight those dangerous leftovers – a cold atmospheric plasma system – has been approved for human clinical … Continue reading FDA approves clinical trial of cold plasma "scalpel" for cancer treatment
Imagine if you will that you are enthroned upon the porcelain, minding your own business while doing your business. You’re catching up on Hackaday on your phone – c’mon, admit it – when a whir and a buzz comes from behind you. You sit up in alarm, whereupon your lower …read more
Continue reading Fail Of The Week: Toilets And High Voltage Do Not Mix
When scientists need to learn about something, recreating it in the lab is often one of the best ways – and now that even applies to the Sun itself. Physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have built a mini-Sun in the lab, and use… Continue reading Lab-made "Mini-Sun" sheds light on the real thing
“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the saying goes, and when it comes to coatings, it’s true that thinner is often better. The way to truly thin coatings, ones that are sometimes only a few atoms thick, is physical vapor deposition, or PVD, a technique where a …read more
Continue reading Vacuum Sputtering with a Homemade Magnetron
As the Sun and stars themselves can attest, nuclear fusion could be an essentially unlimited energy source, if we can only harness it. The problem is that the plasma used is inherently unstable, and large eruptions can damage the reactors con… Continue reading Nuclear fusion plasma could be stabilized against large eruptions – by causing lots of small ones
“This is one of the most extraordinary black hole systems I’ve ever come across.” Continue reading This Black Hole Is Wildly Ejecting Plasma Jets as It Eats a Star
It’s basically a lightsaber. Except smaller. And with an invisible blade. And cold to the touch. But other than that, this homebrew cold plasma torch (YouTube, embedded below) is just like the Jedi’s choice in elegant weaponry.
Perhaps we shouldn’t kid [Justin] given how hard he worked on this project …read more
Continue reading Cold Plasma Torch Produces a Cleansing Flame that Never Consumes
You’ve probably seen the videos of a grape — cut almost totally in half — in a microwave creates a plasma. A recent physics paper studies the phenomenon with a lot of high-tech gear and now the actual mechanism is known. [Veritasium] interviews the scientists and explains the grape plasma …read more
Black holes swallow everything that comes in contact with them, so how do plasma jets manage to escape their intense gravity? Continue reading New Supercomputer Simulations Show How Plasma Jets Escape Black Holes