Although there’s been considerable excitement over the past half century of a Jetsons-like robotic future, outside of a few niche uses of our day-to-day lives there hasn’t been much in …read more
Silicone is a useful material for many purposes. Traditionally, creating something out of silicone required injection molding. That’s not difficult, but it does require a good bit of setup. As …read more
There’s still a mystique around vacuum tubes long after they were rendered obsolete by solid state devices, and many continue to experiment with them. They can be bought new, but …read more
Imagine if, somehow, telephones of all kinds had not been invented. Then, this morning, someone entered a big corporation board room and said, “We’d like to string copper wire to …read more
Back in the days of 8-bit computers, like no doubt many readers of similar age, we wrote little games. First in BASIC, then augmented with little machine code speed-ups. We …read more
We have all heard the statistics on how safe air travel is, with more people dying and getting injured on their way to and from the airport than while traveling …read more
You know those “What my friends think I do” vs “What I actually do” memes? Well there should be one for 3D printing that highlights what you think you’ll do …read more
With multi-segment displays, what you see available online is pretty much what you get. LEDs, LCDs, VFDs; if you want to keep your BOM at a reasonable price, you’ve pretty …read more
Imagine taking a significant amount of metals and other materials out of the Earth’s crust and scattering it into the atmosphere from space. This is effectively what we have been …read more
Researchers at Rice University have found an alloy of copper, vanadium, and sulfur that forms crystals that, due to quantum effects, can trap electrons. This can produce flat bands, which …read more
This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman talk with Matt Ray about OpenCost. What exactly is Cloud Native? Why do we need a project just for tracking expenses? Doesn’t the …read more
If you read Byte magazine in 1983, you might have expected that, by now, you’d be able to buy the red phone with the video screen built-in. You know, like …read more
As a game concept, Tetris gave humanity nearly four solid decades of engagement, but with the possibility for only seven possible puzzle pieces it might seem a little bit limiting. …read more
Flexible cables and flex PCBs are wonderful. You could choose to carefully make a cable bundle out of ten wires and try to squish them to have a thin footprint …read more
In the year 79 CE, a massive cloud of volcanic ash rained down on the Roman city of Herculaneum after an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Along with the city of …read more
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
The mobile phone is an expensive and often surprisingly fragile device, whose manufacturers are notorious for making them as difficult to repair as possible. Glued-together cases and unreplaceable batteries abound, …read more
It doesn’t take much chasing things around the bench with a soldering iron to appreciate the value of good work holding. And don’t get us started on those cheap “helping …read more
For plenty of media center PCs, home theaters, and people with a simple TV and a decent audio system, the standard speaker setup now is 5.1 surround sound. Left and …read more
Little has to be said about why superconducting materials are so tantalizing, or what the benefits of an ambient pressure, room temperature material with superconducting properties would be. The main …read more