Author: Navarre Bartz

308 Articles

A hand holds a small PCB with an edge connector over the exposed, mostly black components of an M4 Mac mini. The bottom cover is hanging by an FFC cable off to the left of the

Upgrading The M4 Mac Mini With More Storage

December 1, 2024 by 17 Comments

Apple’s in-house chips have some impressive specs, but user serviceability is something Apple left behind for consumer machines around a decade ago. Repair legend [dosdude1] shows us how the new M4 Mac mini can get a sizeable storage upgrade without paying the Apple tax.

The Mac mini is Apple’s least expensive machine, and in the old days you could swap a SATA drive for more storage and not pay the exorbitant prices that OEMs demand. Never one to turn down a walled garden, later Intel machines and now the ARM-based M-series chips soldered storage into the machine leaving an upgrade out of the hands of anyone without a hot air station.

Both the Mac Studio and Mac mini now have proprietary storage cards, and after some tinkering, [dosdude1] has successfully upgraded the storage on the base model M4 mini. While most people don’t casually reball NAND chips while chatting on a video, his previous work with others in the space to make a Mac Studio upgrade kit give us hope we’ll soon see economical storage upgrades that keep the Mac mini affordable.

We’ve previously covered the first time Apple tried to make its own processors, and some of their more recent attempts at repairability.

Continue reading “Upgrading The M4 Mac Mini With More Storage” →

A brown sphere with a flat top, a nose and circular eyes sits on the ground surrounded by low vegetation. A wooden fence is behind it.

Making A Stool From Clay

November 30, 2024 by 8 Comments

We’ve seen furniture made out of all sorts of interesting materials here, but clay certainly isn’t the first one that comes to mind. [Mia Mueller] is expanding our horizons with this clay stool she made for her garden.

Starting with an out-of-budget inspiration piece, [Mueller] put her own spin on a ceramic stool that looks like a whimsical human head. An experienced potter, she shows us several neat techniques for working with larger pieces throughout the video. Her clay extruder certainly beats making coils by hand like we did in art class growing up! Leaving the coils wrapped in a tarp allows her to batch the process coils and leave them for several days without worrying about them drying out.

Dealing with the space constraints of her small kiln, her design is a departure from the small scale prototype, but seeing how she works through the problems is what really draws us to projects like this in the first place. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be making, would it? The final result is a beautiful addition to her garden and should last a long time since it won’t rot or rust.

If you’re thinking of clay as a medium, we have some other projects you might enjoy like this computer mouse, 3D printing with clay, or a clay battery.

Continue reading “Making A Stool From Clay” →

Stylized silver text with the the word: "arpa-e" over the further text: "Changing What's Possible"

Uncle Sam Wants You To Recover Energy Materials From Wastewater

November 30, 2024 by 22 Comments

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) was founded to support moonshot projects in the realm of energy, with a portfolio that ranges from the edge of current capabilities to some pretty far out stuff. We’re not sure exactly where their newest “Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)” falls, but they’re looking for critical materials from the wastewater treatment process. [via CleanTechnica]

As a refresher, critical materials are those things that are bottlenecks in a supply chain that you don’t want to be sourcing from unfriendly regions. For the electrification of transportation and industrial processes required to lower carbon emissions, lithium, cobalt, and other rare earth elements are pretty high on the list.

ARPA-E also has an interest in ammonia-based products which is particularly interesting as industrial fertilizers can wreak havoc on natural ecosystems when they become run off instead of making it into the soil. As any farmer knows, inputs cost money, so finding an economical way to recover those products from wastewater would be a win-win. “For all categories, the final recovered products will need to include at least two targeted high energy-value materials, have greater than 90% recovery efficiency, and be commercially viable in the U.S. market.” If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like to try hacking on, consider filling out an Applicant Profile.

If you’re curious about where we’re getting some of these materials from right now, checkout our series on Mining and Refining, including the lithium and cobalt ARPA-E wants more of.

A researcher in a safety harness pollinates an American chestnut tree from a lift. Another researcher is on the other side of the lift and appears to be taking notes. The tree has bags over some of its branches, presumably to control the pollen that gets in. The lift has a grey platform and orange arm.

Hacking Trees To Bring Back The American Chestnut

November 29, 2024 by 36 Comments

“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is playing on the radio now in the Northern Hemisphere which begs the question, “What happened to the American chestnut?” Would you be surprised to hear there’s a group dedicated to bringing it back from “functional extinction?” [via Inhabitat]

Between logging and the introduction of chestnut blight, the once prevalent American chestnut became increasingly uncommon throughout its traditional range in the Appalachians. While many trees in the southern range were killed by Phytophthora root rot (PRR), the chestnut blight leaves roots intact, so many chestnuts have been surviving by growing back from the roots only to succumb to the blight and be reborn again. Now, scientists are using a combination of techniques to develop blight-resistant trees from this remaining population.

The American Chestnut Foundation recognizes you can’t improve what you can’t measure and uses a combination of “small stem assays (SSAs) performed on potted seedlings, improved phenotype scoring methods for field-grown trees, and the use of genomic prediction models for scoring resistance based on genotype.” This allows them to more rapidly screen varieties for blight resistance to further their efforts. One approach is based on conventional plant breeding techniques and has been crossing blight and PRR-resistant Chinese chestnuts with the American type. PRR resistance has been found to be less genetically complicated, so progress has been faster on resistance to that particular problem. Continue reading “Hacking Trees To Bring Back The American Chestnut” →

Waves crash near a rocky shore. Large, SUV-sized blue "floaters" sit in the water perpendicular to a concrete pier. The floaters look somewhat like a bass boat shrink wrapped in dark blue plastic and attached to a large piston and hinge. A grey SUV sits on the pier, almost as if for scale.

US Is Getting Its First Onshore Wave Power Plant

November 28, 2024 by 60 Comments

Renewables let you have a more diverse set of energy inputs so you aren’t putting all your generation eggs in one basket. One type of renewable that doesn’t see a lot of love, despite 80% of the world’s population living within 100 km (~60 mi) of a coastline, is harnessing the energy of the tides. [via Electrek]

“The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that wave energy has the potential to generate over 1,400 terawatt-hours per year,” so while this initial project won’t be huge, the overall possible power generation from tidal power is nothing to sneeze at. Known more for its role in shipping fossil fuels, the Port of Los Angeles will host the new wave power pilot being built by Eco Wave Power and Shell. Eco Wave’s system uses floaters to drive pistons that compress hydraulic fluid and turn a generator before the decompressed fluid is returned to the pistons in a nice, tidy loop.

Eco Wave plans to finish construction by early 2025 and already has the power conversion unit onsite at the Port of Los Angeles. While the press release is mum on the planned install capacity, Eco Wave claims they will soon have 404.7 MW of installed capacity through several different pilot projects around the world.

We covered another Swedish company trying to harness tidal power with underwater kites, and if wave power isn’t your thing but you still like mixing water and electricity, why not try offshore wind or a floating solar farm? Just make sure to keep the noise down!

Hacking The Soil To Combat Desertification

November 24, 2024 by 14 Comments

While the Sahara Desert is an important ecosystem in its own right, its human neighbors in the Sahel would like it to stop encroaching on their environment. [Andrew Millison] took a look at how the people in the region are using “half moons” and zai pits to fight desertification.

With assistance from the World Food Program, people in Niger and all throughout the Sahel have been working on restoring damaged landscapes using traditional techniques that capture water during the rainy season to restore the local aquifer. The water goes to plants which provide forage during the 9 drier months of the year.

The main trick is using pits and contouring of the soil to catch rain as it falls. Give the ground time to absorb the water instead of letting it run off. Not only does this restore the aquifers, it also reduces flooding during during the intense rain events in the area. With the water constrained, plants have time to develop, and a virtuous cycle of growth and water retention allows people to have a more pleasant microclimate as well as enhanced food security. In the last five years, 500,000 people in Niger no longer need long-term food assistance as a result of these resiliency projects.

If this seems familiar, we previously covered the Great Green Wall at a more macro level. While we’re restoring the environment with green infrastructure, can we plant a trillion trees?

Continue reading “Hacking The Soil To Combat Desertification” →

An artist's depiction of a lystrosaurus munching on a prehistoric plant. It looks kind of like a hippo with a beak. The main body of the animal is grey-ish green and it's beak is ivory with two tusks jutting out from its top jaw.

Mammalian Ancestors Shed Light On The Great Dying

November 22, 2024 by 31 Comments

As we move through the Sixth Extinction, it can be beneficial to examine what caused massive die-offs in the past. Lystrosaurus specimens from South Africa have been found that may help clarify what happened 250 million years ago. [via IFLScience]

The Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, or the Great Dying, takes the cake for the worst extinction we know about so far on our pale blue dot. The primary cause is thought to be intense volcanic activity which formed the Siberian Traps and sent global CO2 levels soaring. In Karoo Basin of South Africa, 170 tetrapod fossils were found that lend credence to the theory. Several of the Lystrosaurus skeletons were preserved in a spread eagle position that “are interpreted as drought-stricken carcasses that collapsed and died of starvation in and alongside dried-up water sources.”

As Pangea dried from increased global temperatures, drought struck many different terrestrial ecosystems and changed them from what they were before. The scientists say this “likely had a profound and lasting influence on the evolution of tetrapods.” As we come up on the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, perhaps you should give thanks for the prehistoric volcanism that led to your birth?

If you want to explore more about how CO2 can lead to life forms having a bad day, have a look at paleoclimatology and what it tells us about today. In more recent history, have a look at how we can detect volcanic eruptions from all around the world and how you can learn more about the Earth by dangling an antenna from a helicopter.