How To Remove Bounce When Bouncy Objects Encounter Bounciness

June 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

We all love a good bit of bounce now and then, with everything from trampolines to bouncy castles and bouncy balls forming the staple of a wholesome childhood for many. That said, most of our bouncy experiences in day to day life concern bouncy objects that meet immovable or rigid objects, including said child having a blast in a bouncy castle. Where the physics get arguably more interesting and less intuitive is when you combine two objects that are both bouncy, with [Steve Mould] recently taking a look at the tuning of said bounciness to even kill the bounce completely.

Understanding how to achieve this tuning means understanding how the kinetic energy is stored in each flexible material, and how to dissipate it in a way that doesn’t result in the aforementioned bounciness. In the simple physical demonstration setup the addition or removal of weights to the lower sprung platform tunes the response to the bouncy ball that is dropped on top of it.

After going through the science behind bounciness and springiness using the practical application of this science in the context of golf balls and clubs, [Steve] introduces the simulation tool that he created. This allows you to tweak the parameters of such a double spring system, which may bring back some high school physics lessons for some.

In a system like that of a golf club and the ball, having undesirable oscillations (bouncing) reduces the final kinetic energy transferred to the ball. Although ‘bouncy’ is perhaps not the first thought that comes to mind when handling a golf ball or a club, ultimately they are just as bouncy as a bouncy ball or an electric switch, just on their own scales, with their own opportunities for optimization and analysis.

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Retro Gear And The Mystery Of Cables Melting Into Cases While In Storage

June 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

The phenomenon of cable-shaped indents in the plastic cases of retro systems is one that’s probably painfully familiar to many a collector of such systems. Although in these situations neither side got hot enough to cause any melting – especially while disconnected in storage – it still has that same melted appearance. The real cause here is not heat, but plasticizer migration, as detailed in a recent video by [Run Stop Restored] over on YouTube.

Plasticizers are an additive to many plastics that aim to make it more flexible (‘plastic’), as well as improve other characteristics of the base material, with PVC in particular relying on plasticizers to give it its desired properties for applications where PVC has to be flexible. Here the flexible cable insulation of these devices generally uses PVC, which over time can migrate to other polymers when brought into close contact for extended periods of time.

The – usually ABS – enclosures of e.g. Commodore tape drives as in this video demonstration thus get correspondingly inundated with the same type of plasticizers that ABS is also highly susceptible to. Since in storage the cables tend to be wrapped – tightly – around the device they’re attached to, this results in a solid contact which thus enables this gradual process to work its magic, whether it’s a Commodore datasette or a power supply brick.

Correspondingly the PVC insulation becomes brittle as it loses its plasticizer, with the process sped up by higher environmental temperatures. To prevent this, never wrap a PVC cable around a device, and keep it physically separated from susceptible plastics like ABS as much as reasonably possible. Along with a cool environment this should prevent plasticizer migration from ruining what used to be a pristine case.

This problem is particularly significant for retro gear from the 1980s and thereabouts, before phthalate-free plasticizer alternatives were developed, along with other changes such as more stable formulations that prevent this migration process. Adding a coating can also help, especially for protecting older gear, but flexible PVC in particular should be viewed with suspicion and treated carefully.

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Microsoft’s Topological Quantum Computing Claims Once Again In Question

June 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

A central problem with the arguably overhyped field of quantum computing remains the difficulty in objectively ascertaining performance and new developments, as much here relies on indirect measurements. Such is especially the case with topological quantum computing, with its use of Majorana fermions. For a few years now Microsoft’s quantum computing department (Azure Quantum) has made claims here of major progress, which have subsequently repeatedly been shot down in peer review. Their most recent attempt at said progress in topological quantum computing now got a blistering response (PDF) by Henry F. Legg in an article in Nature.

We previously reported on Microsoft’s attempts here in early 2025, when they claimed the detection of the crucial Majorana Zero Mode (MZM), before it faced the criticisms of peer review, including by Legg, which included academically vicious language by some researchers, including terms like ‘essentially fraudulent’.

This raises the awkward question of whether Microsoft’s quantum researchers are just too eager to confirm a discovery, or whether a more benign reason exists.

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Hacking A Reverse Osmosis Water Filter Through Its Smart Faucet

June 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

Reverse-osmosis (RO) systems are one way to ensure that you get very clean drinking water. The Waterdrop G3P600 variety that [Tomasz Wasilczyk] recently purchased is definitely among the fanciest and ‘smartest’, with the faucet having its own 7-segment display and gaggle of LEDs connected to the actual RO unit with a four-pin connector. This naturally meant that whatever protocol runs on this cable had to be reverse-engineered for science.

Now with more custom PCB. (Credit: Tomasz Wasilczyk) — Now with more custom PCB.

The main practical benefit here is to make the system smarter — such as plugging it into a home automation system with ESPHome support, as well as make it play nice with refrigerator lines.

What automation and monitoring options exist here thus depend on what data gets sent between the RO unit and the faucet. Fortunately this turned out to be quite extensive, ranging from filter health, the water quality and pump status as well as air temperature and faucet state.

Unsurprisingly the four-pin connector turned out to be a basic serial link, with 5 V, ground and a 9,600 baud connection. From this it was easy enough to deduce the protocol, and by looking at what lit up on the faucet, a custom PCB wasn’t far behind.

After one blown-up fuse later due to getting 24 V instead of 12 V on the RO unit when tapping off power, the unit popped to life and was able to be connected to Home Assistant, from where the entire functionality and what triggered what could be mapped out. Of course, there’s still more to be discovered and reverse-engineered in the unit, but this seems like a good place to start.

Making A Magnetic Core Memory USB Drive

June 29, 2026 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Some of us have felt somewhat nervous about the collapse of DRAM and NAND Flash memory supply in the consumer market, while others seem to have fully embraced it. Someone like [polymatt] for example, whose recent project entails a USB drive that skips back quite a few decades and opts to use a glorious 64-bit core memory device for storage.

To really embrace the DIY spirit here, the PCBs were milled using a small CNC router before the core memory was assembled alongside the other components, including apparently L293 H-bridge ICs as the drivers, along with an ESP32 module for the brains and USB interface.

Core memory relies on sensing the state of a cell through a destructive read action, which thus requires a fair bit of surrounding logic to set up read and writes, parse sense line values and restore any read value after said destructive read. Determining the right voltage to use during read and write actions is essential, and here determined experimentally.

The final build contains two PCBs inside an enclosure that’s filled with silicone oil. Other than looking cool through the acrylic window, it also helps to keep the individual cores at a fairly consistent temperature, which is helpful with reliable bit flipping, even if it’s probably overkill here.

Ignoring for a moment that just the memory required for the USB stack in the ESP32 module is many times the size of this core memory device, it’s still a very cool project whose appeal goes far beyond mere practicality.

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The Terrifying 2011-Era Case Of Max Planck’s Retracted Papers

June 29, 2026 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

In the world of scientific publishing there are many reasons why a paper can be retracted, but generally there is an obvious and clearly communicated reason for doing so. Thus when [Yves Gingras] – a historian of physics – and [Mahdi Khelfaoui] – a colleague – noticed recently that two 1940s papers by [Max Planck] had been quite recently retracted, this resulted in an eyebrow-raising double-take, before naturally publishing their investigation’s findings on arXiv.

They first became aware of this courtesy of the site Retraction Watch and their list of ‘Retractions by Nobel Prize winners‘, which had the authors do a spit-take when they saw [Max Planck] listed. This page led them to a total of two database entries, as listed above. One is for a 1940 paper, the other for a 1942 paper, only five years before [Planck]’s death.

As for the provided reasons, both articles were struck with a generic ‘copyright violation’, which at the very least seems somewhat puzzling, and started both authors of this recent investigation on their journey. What they found was less of a nefarious plot and more of an accidental black hole that had formed when scientific journals began to digitize papers.

The original journal that [Planck]’s papers were published in was absorbed like so many into Springer Nature, where an automated system then tried to sort through all the papers, including the usual detecting of copyright issues. With these papers predating the era of convenient DOIs and the more standard forms of citing related works, said automated system appears to have become rather confused and hurt these papers in its confusion.

From the side of Springer Nature there has so far been no commentary on this, and as of writing the original papers are still listed as withdrawn. Although one can still read the original scanned papers via the Internet Archive, such as here the 1940 paper, it’s disturbing to see that automated systems have apparently been let loose on these veritable archives of scientific and academic history, heedless of the damage inflicted along the way.

Although after fifteen years these two retractions were finally noticed, the more harrowing question is probably just how many papers from potentially less well-known authors were quietly scuttled. If this can happen to [Planck]’s works, it would appear that nobody is safe, including legends like [Bohr], [Einstein] and so many others.

Cramming A Mini-ITX Gaming PC Into A 3D Printed Steam Machine Sized Case

June 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

The recently released Valve Steam Machine is somewhat awkward in that it uses a custom, non-standard PCB and non-standard power supply. This fact apparently has irked some people who decided that it makes perfect sense to try and cram a Mini-ITX board, Small Form Factor (SFF) PSU and full-sized discrete GPU into an enclosure of the same size. Cue the SFF Mini-ITX Steam Machine Case project by [3DCatt] over at Printables.

This is apparently a project done in cooperation with AMD’s [Jacob Terkelsen], who showed off the 3D printed case stuffed full with the aforementioned parts, which includes a GeForce RTX 5060 GPU. Of note is that the Valve Steam Machine uses a different cooling configuration as it has both the CPU and GPU on the same PCB. These share the same massive heatsink, as can be seen in e.g. the [Gamers Nexus] teardown video.

For this angular imitation machine it would have been nice to use a blower-style GPU, to exhaust the hot air rather than dump it all into the case. This is also an issue that was raised by [Jacob], with more ventilation added to mitigate the issue. What the overall performance will be compared to regular compact Mini-ITX cases remains to be seen, but if you really want to live the Steam Machine life and have some parts kicking around along with a 3D printer, it might be worth a shot.