A man named [Jim Valvano] once said “There are 86,400 seconds in a day. It’s up to you to decide what to do with them.” — while we couldn’t tell you who [Jim Valvano] …

If you are looking for the perfect instrument to start a biological horror show in our age of AI, you have come to the right place. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have successfully used AI…

There was a time when all the cool kids had a 45 RPM record player. [RF Burns] picked up a 1950s-era player from  RCA. However, it needed a lot of work. The good news? We get to see the teardown an…

We’re probably all familiar with adding wood dust, hemp and carbon fibers to PLA filament, but there are so many other fillers one could add. During the completely unrelated recent heatwave i…

As part of his multi-year project to build a quantum computer, hacakday.io poster [skywo1f] has shared with us his most recent accomplishment — a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer, whic…

Among this crowd, it’s safe to say that the original 68000 Macintosh computers need no introduction, but it’s possible some of you aren’t familiar with Chip8. It was an interprete…

When buying used cars there are plenty of ways to check on their history. In many countries there are systems, like Carfax for parts of North America and Europe, that can provide crash history in s…

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 esse…

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…

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 th…

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 b…

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 Technol…

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 fusio…

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 st…

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…

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 fairl…

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…

Over on their substack [ObsoleteSony] has a new article: The Last Disc: How Blu-ray Won the War but Lost the Future. In this article the author takes us through the history of Blu-ray media and how…

Supersonic air travel is great if you want to get somewhere quickly. Indeed, the Concorde could rush you from New York to London in less than three and a half hours, over twice as fast as a convent…

This week Jonathan and Katherine talk with Jamie Abrahams about Drupal, and how AI just makes sense. No, really. Jamie makes a compelling case that Drupal is a really good tool for building AI work…