The Smell Of Space

In space, so the Alien tagline goes, nobody can hear you scream. One of the most memorable pieces of movie promotion ever, it refers to the effect of the vacuum of space on the things human senses require an atmosphere to experience. It’s a lesson that Joss Whedon used to …read more

Fresh Food Year Round? You Can Thank Frederick McKinley Jones

When you’re a kid, one of the surest signs of summer is hearing the happy sound of the ice cream truck crawling through the neighborhood. You don’t worry about how that magical truck is keeping the ice cream cold, only that it rolls down your street, and that the stars …read more

Don’t Let Endianness Flip You Around

Most of the processor architectures which we come into contact with today are little-endian systems, meaning that they store and address bytes in a least-significant byte (LSB) order. Unlike in the past, when big-endian architectures, including the Motorola 68000 and PowerPC, were more common, one can often just assume that …read more

Linux-Fu: Help Messages For Shell Scripts And Here Documents

Imagine that you want to output multiple lines of text in Bash, or any shell script. Maybe it’s for a help string for a particularly convoluted shell script you’re writing. You could have a separate echo command for each line. Or you could use the “here document“.

The “here document” …read more

COVID Tracing Apps: What Europe Has Done Right, And Wrong

Europe has been in COVID-containment mode for the last month, in contrast to the prior three months of serious lockdown. Kids went back to school, in shifts, and people went on vacation to countries with similarly low infection rates. Legoland and the zoo opened back up, capped at 1/3 capacity. …read more

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Proteus, The Shape-Shifting And Possibly Non-Cuttable Material

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By Kristina Panos | August 6, 2020

How cool would it be if there was a material that couldn’t be cut or drilled into? You could make the baddest bike lock, the toughest-toed work boots, or the most secure door. Really, the list of possibilities just goes on and on.

Researchers from the UK and Germany claim …read more
Scratch Built Subnautica Sub Explores The Pool

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By Tom Nardi | August 6, 2020

In Subnautica, players explore an alien underwater landscape with the help of a number of futuristic tools and vehicles. [Robert Cook] found himself particularly enamored with the large submarine you unlock towards the later parts of the game, so much so that he decided to build his own real-life …read more
Miles The Spider Robot

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By Orlando Hoilett | August 6, 2020

Who doesn’t love robotic spiders? Today’s biomimetic robot comes in the form of Miles, the quadruped spider robot from [_Robox].

Miles uses twelve servos to control its motion, three on each of its legs, and also includes a standard HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor for some obstacle avoidance capabilities. Twelve servos …read more
Mold-Making Masterclass In Minutes

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By Kristina Panos | August 5, 2020

Making silicone molds seems easy, but there are a lot of missteps to be made along the way that can mean the difference between a great, reusable mold, and one that’s a sad waste of silicone. If you’re helpless to know the difference, then check out [Eric Strebel]’s 9-minute masterclass …read more
Can You Remembrandt Where This Is From?

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By Sharon Lin | August 5, 2020

A group of researchers have built an algorithm for finding hidden connections in artwork.

The team, comprised of computer scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Microsoft, used paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to demonstrate these hidden connections, which link artwork …read more
A Wood Gas Powered Lawn Mower

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By Danie Conradie | August 5, 2020

When mowing the lawn, you generally have a choice of pushing power, electric or gasoline. Thanks to the nutty inventor [Colin Furze], you can now add wood gas to the list, as long as you don’t mind some inconvenience. He built a wood gas generator on top of a formerly …read more
RGB LED Shutter Shades

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By Orlando Hoilett | August 5, 2020

[splat238] is back at it again with another cool RGB LED display project. We were contemplating whether or not our readers have had enough of these over the last few weeks, but we’ve learned over the years that you can never have too many LED projects.

Instead of making a …read more