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…

Quality 3D printing is a common hobbyist tool nowadays, and [wontonnn]’s mini arcade car racing game really shows off how 3D printing can bring parts from functional to fantastic. There are q…

Brunnian links are a type of nontrivial link – or knot – where multiple linked loops become unlinked if a single loop is cut or removed. Beyond ‘fun’ disentanglement toys an…

In case you can’t wait for your flash memory to die from write cycling, TeamGroup now has a drive that, via software or hardware, can destroy its own flash chips with a surge of voltage. If y…

Before social media brought the Internet to the masses, and before even Napster, ICQ, and AIM gave those with a phone line a reason to connect online at all, those who went online often went to a B…

Machine learning and neural nets can be pretty handy, and people continue to push the envelope of what they can do both in high end server farms as well as slower systems. At the extreme end of the…

3D printing is arguably over-used in the maker community. It’s just so easy to run off a quick prototype and then… well, it’s good enough, right? Choosing the right plastic can go…

So far in the “Field Guide” series, we’ve mainly looked at critical infrastructure systems that, while often blending into the scenery, are easily observable once you know where t…

Feeling nostalgic? Weren’t around in the 90s but wonder what it was like? ProtoWeb has you covered! Over on his YouTube channel [RetroTech Chris] shows you how to browse the web like it&#8217…

On this date in 1975, a Soviet and an American shook hands. Even for the time period, this wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened approximately 220 kil…

Do you feel nostalgia for a childhood novelty toy that had potential but ultimately fell short of its promise? Do you now have the skills to go make a better version of that toy to satisfy your lon…

Over on his YouTube channel [Tom Stanton] shows us how to build a Stirling Engine for a bike. A Stirling Engine is a heat engine, powered by the expansion and contraction of a working fluid (such a…

In today’s high-speed information overload environment, we often find ourselves with too much data to take in at once, causing us to occasionally miss out on opportunities otherwise drowned o…