Would Nuclear Winter Cancel Out Global Warming?

January 25, 2022 by Lewin Day 80 Comments

Nuclear war was very much a front-of-mind issue during the fraught political climate of the Cold War era. Since then, atomic sabre rattling has been less frequent, though has never quite disappeared entirely.

Outside of the direct annihilation caused by nuclear war, however, is the threat of nuclear winter. The basic concept is simple: in the aftermath of a major nuclear war, the resulting atmospheric effects could lead to a rapid cooling in global temperatures.

Some say it couldn’t ever happen, while others – including Futurama – suggest with varying degrees of humor that it could help cancel out the effects of global warming. But what is the truth?

Hard data is isn’t really available, as thus far there have been no large-scale nuclear wars for scientists to measure. Several studies have explored the concept of nuclear winter, however, and explored its potential effects.

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555 Teardown Isn’t Just A Good Time, It’s To Die For

January 25, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 10 Comments

It seems only appropriate that hot on the heels of the conclusion of Hackaday’s 555 Timer Contest that [Ken Shirriff] posts a silicon die teardown of an early version of a hacker’s favorite chip, the 555.

Starting with a mystery chip from January 1973, [Eric Schlaepfer] painstakingly sanded down the package to reveal the die, which he deemed to be a 555 timer. Why didn’t they know it was a 555 timer to start? Because the package was not marked with “555” but rather some other marks that you can see in the blog post.

In addition to a great explanation of how the 555 works in general, [Ken] has taken a microscopic look at the 555 die itself. The schematic of a 555 is easily available, and [Ken] identifies not just sections of the die but individual components. He goes further yet by explaining how the PNP and NPN resistors are constructed in silicon. There’s also a nice and juicy bit of insight into the resistors in the IC, but we won’t spoil it here.

Be sure to show your love for the winners of the 555 contest, or at the very least check out the project that took the stop spot: a giant sized 555 that you don’t need a microscope to see inside of.

An Entire Computer In ICMP Packets

January 25, 2022 by Jenny List 19 Comments

The earliest stored program computer in the modern sense was not one of the names such as ENIAC or Colossus that you might expect, but the Manchester Baby, an experimental prototype computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. Its 550 tubes gave it the multi-rack room-filling size common to 1940s machines, but its architecture makes it a comparatively simple processor by the standards of today. So simple in fact, that [Hrvoje Čavrak] has recreated it using ICMP packets as its storage, and a custom packet filter as its processor emulation. It’s a project that’s simultaneously both elegant and gloriously pointless, but as he says, “It’s still better than doing drugs or JavaScript”.

The result simulates the Baby’s combined storage and display tube in a dump of the network traffic, and gives an excellent excuse to read up about its operation. The tiny instruction set brings to mind today’s RISC architectures, but this is illusory as the designers of 1948 would have had less of an eye towards clock cycles than they would have towards the machine working at all in the first place.

If early computers tickle your fancy it may be worth taking a while to read about the UK’s National Museum of Computing, and then about Colossus, the primordial electronic computer.

Header: Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0.