Bio-inspired “plasmonic paint” could make regular paint a thing of the past

Traditional paint gets it color from synthetic pigments, which fade over time and aren’t very eco-friendly. There may soon be a better alternative, though, in the form of a paint which incorporates color-producing nanostructures.Continue ReadingCategor… Continue reading Bio-inspired “plasmonic paint” could make regular paint a thing of the past

Butterflies cup their wings to produce tiny jets and evade predators

By analyzing the way butterflies rapidly take flight in wind tunnel experiments, scientists have uncovered new detail around how the insects evade predators. The mechanics of their wings were found to help generate small pockets of air that can quickly… Continue reading Butterflies cup their wings to produce tiny jets and evade predators

Portable Pi Teensy Thumboard

Even on the go, there is no substitute for a physical keyboard with buttons that move and click. Sure, you could solder a bunch of tactile switches to some perfboard, but how about going all out and making something robust as [Anthony DiGirolamo] did for his Teensy Thumboard. Everything is insertion-mount so it is an approachable project for anyone who knows the dangerous end of a soldering iron, and that also makes it easy to hack on.

Each pin of the Teensy has an adjacent empty hole tied to it for easy access, and the serial data pins are exposed …read more

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A Radar Module Teardown And Measuring Fan Speed The Hard Way

If you have even the slightest interest in microwave electronics and radar, you’re in for a treat. The Signal Path is back with another video, and this one covers the internals of a simple 24-GHz radar module along with some experiments that we found fascinating.

The radar module that [Shahriar] works with in the video below is a CDM324 that can be picked up for a couple of bucks from the usual sources. As such it contains a lot of lessons in value engineering and designing to a price point, and the teardown reveals that it contains but a single …read more

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Ancient Insect Scales Analyzed With Help Of Nose Hair

Scientists working to advance the frontier of knowledge frequently also need to invent their tools along the way. Sometimes these are interesting little hacks to get a job done. Recently some researchers found ancestors of moths and butterflies older than any previously known by analyzing tiny scales found alongside ancient pollen. They needed a tool to manipulate these scales: separating them from surrounding debris, transferring them to microscope slides. The special tool was a needle tipped with a single human nostril hair.

As ancient insects were the published paper‘s focus, their use of nose hair tipped needle was only given …read more

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Researchers say hackers responsible for 2013 Microsoft, Facebook breaches have disappeared

A mercenary hacker group has been linked to a newly disclosed 2013 breach at Microsoft in which the attackers accessed a highly sensitive internal database that held information about software flaws in company products, according to Reuters and prior research conducted by a cohort of cybersecurity experts. The latest revelations about Microsoft are all the more concerning because the hacker group responsible, dubbed by security researchers as “Wild Neutron,” “ButterFly” or “Zero Wing,” have become virtually untraceable since September 2015. Although experts say that Wild Neutron likely remains active, recent evidence of their exploits is lacking. “It’s kind of scary to think we haven’t even seen them in a while,” said Brian Bartholomew, a senior security researcher with Kaspersky Lab. “They just sort of fell off the radar … that could be due to a significant change in tactics or tools or just a lull in activity … It’s anyone’s guess.” […]

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