Do jumper wires pulling out of your Uno have you pulling your hair out? Is troubleshooting loose jumpers making you lose your mind? Are your projects backing up because of all the time you’ve lost keeping jumper wires secure in your Arduino Uno? Then you need the all new Ardunio Strain Relief Enclosure!
[Jeremy Cook] has had it with loose jumpers pulling out of his Uno, so he designed a case that not only secures the Arduino; it also keeps those dastardly jumper wires from pulling out at the most inconvenient times.
Composed of 3/4 inch thick MDF and 1/8 inch thick polycarbonate, the Arduino Strain Relief enclosure is sure to be a hit for every hacker’s work bench. [Jeremy] used a CNC router to cut the enclosure and top. The plastic top is secured to the MDF base via four 4-40 screws. Interestingly – he applied super glue to the screw holes in the MDF before tapping them. We’ll have to try this trick on our next project!
Hold out your hands in front of you, palms forward. They look quite similar, but I’m sure you’re all too aware that they’re actually mirror images of each other. Your hands are chiral objects, which means they’re asymmetric but not superimposable. This property is quite interesting when studying the physical properties of matter. A chiral molecule can have completely different properties from its mirrored counterpart. In physics, producing the mirror image of something is known as parity. And in 1927, a hypothetical law known as the conservation of parity was formulated. It stated that no matter the experiment or physical interaction between objects – parity must be conserved. In other words, the results of an experiment would remain the same if you tired it again with the experiment arranged in its mirror image. There can be no distinction between left/right or clockwise/counter-clockwise in terms of any physical interaction.
Dr. Wu working with a particle accelerator via Biography.
The nuclear physicist, Chien-Shiung Wu, who would eventually prove that quantum mechanics discriminates between left- and right-handedness, was a woman, and the two men who worked out the theory behind the “Wu Experiment” received a Nobel prize for their joint work. If we think it’s strange that quantum mechanics works differently for mirror-image particles, how strange is it that a physicist wouldn’t get recognized just because of (her) gender? We’re mostly here to talk about the physics, but we’ll get back to Chien-Shiung Wu soon.
The End of Parity
Conservation of parity was the product of a physicist by the name of Eugene P. Wigner, and it would play an important role in the growing maturity of quantum mechanics. It was common knowledge that macro-world objects like planets and baseballs followed Wigner’s conservation of parity. To suggest that this law extended into the quantum world was intuitive, but not more than intuition. And at that time, it was already well known that quantum objects did not play by the same rules as classical objects. Would quantum mechanics be so strange as to care about handedness? Continue reading “There Is No Parity: Chien-Shiung Wu”→
When you hear someone say “Einstein”, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Is it high IQ… genius… or maybe E=MC2? Do you picture his wild grey hair shooting in all directions as he peacefully folds the pages back from his favorite book? You might even think of nuclear bombs, clocks and the Nobel Prize. It will come as a surprise to many that these accomplishments were a very small part of his life. Indeed, Einstein turned the world of classical physics upside down with his general theory of relativity. But he was only in his early twenties when he did so.
What about the rest of his life? Was Einstein a “one-hit-wonder”? What else did he put his remarkable mind to? Surely he tackled other dilemmas that plagued the scientific world during his moment in history. He was a genius after all… arguably one of the smartest people to have ever walked the earth. His very name has become synonymous with genius. He pulled the rug out from under Isaac Newton, whose theories had held the universe together for over 300 years. He talked about enigmatic concepts like space and time with an elegance that laid bare the beauty hidden within their simplicity. Statues have been made of him. His name and face are recognizable across the globe.
But when you hear someone say “Einstein”, do you think of a man who spent the better half of his life… being wrong? You should.
What does body building, anti-aging cream and Bleomycin (a cancer drug) have in common? Peptides of course! Peptides are large molecules that are vital to life. If you were to take a protein and break it into smaller pieces, each piece would be called a peptide. Just like proteins, peptides are made of amino acids linked together in a chain-like structure. Whenever you ingest a protein, your body breaks it down to its individual amino acids. It then puts those amino acids back together in a different order to make whatever peptide or protein your body needs. Insulin, for instance, is a peptide that is 51 amino acids long. Your body synthesizes insulin from the amino acids it gets from the proteins you eat.
Peptides and small proteins can be synthesized in a lab as well. Peptide synthesis is a huge market in the pharmaceutical and skin care industry. They’re also used, somewhat shadily, as a steroid substitute by serious athletes and body builders. In this article, we’re going to go over the basic steps of how to join amino acids together to make a peptide. The chemistry of peptide synthesis is complex and well beyond the scope of this article. But the basic steps of making a peptide are not as difficult as you might think. Join me after the break to gain a basic understanding of how peptides are synthesized in labs across the world, and to establish a good footing should you ever wish to delve deeper and make peptides on your own.
Imagine a fire hydrant being lifted high into the air by a large helium balloon. It goes higher and higher, but suddenly gas starts to leak out of the nozzle, which makes it sound like it’s trying to talk… but with a distinct lisp. A colorful bumblebee then lands on the balloon, licks it, and says “really yum!” Then the bee takes out its stinger and bores on to the balloon. It pops, causing the fire hydrant to come crashing down. It smashes into a military jeep causing a massive explosion… as if it had been destroyed by a car bomb. Fortunately, the owner of the jeep, a general, was out on his rowing boat at the time. He likes to row his boat at night, and is known as the “night-rowing general” around the base. He was rowing with a bit more exertion than usual, and had to don an oxygen mask to help him breath. But the mask was full of fluoride, which turned his teeth bright neon colors.
You’re probably wondering what the hell you just read. Maybe you’re thinking the author had a stroke. Has the site been hacked? Maybe it’s a prank? What if I told you that you’ve just memorized the first 10 elements of the periodic table.
Much of your memory is stored in the form of associations. Encoding things you need to remember into a silly story takes advantage of this fact. The memory of a ‘night-rowing-general’ is already in your head. You can see him in the theater of your mind… rowing his boat under a black sky… the silver stars on his green hat reflecting the moonlight. Associating this visual representation of the night-rowing-general with the term ‘Nitrogen’ is very easy for your brain to do.
You’re probably already familiar with this type of learning. Does “Bad Boys Run Over Yellow Gardenias Behind Victory Garden Walls” ring a bell? It’s nothing new. In fact, storing memories in the form of mental images was the preferred memorization method of the scholars in ancient times. Today, it has allowed people to perform staggering feats of memorization. Want to know how [Akira Haraguchi] was able to memorize 111,700 digits of Pi?
In the waning hours of 2010, a hacking group known as Lulzsec ran rampant across the Internet, leaving a path of compromised servers, a trail of defaced home pages, leaked emails, and login information in their wake. They were eventually busted via human error, and the leader of the group becoming an FBI informant. This handful of relatively young hackers had made a huge mess of things. After the digital dust had settled – researches, journalists, and coders began to dissect just how these seemingly harmless group of kids were able to harness so much power and control over the World Wide Web. What they found was not only eye-opening to web masters and coders, but shined a light on just how vulnerable all of our data was for everyone to see. It ushered in an era of renewed focus on security and how to write secure code.
In this Dark Arts series, we have taken a close look at the primary techniques the Luzsec hackers used to gain illegal access to servers. We’ve covered two them – SQL injection (SQLi) and cross-site scripting (XSS). In this article, we’ll go over the final technique called remote file inclusion (RFI).
DISCLAIMER: Fortunately, the surge of security-minded coding practices after the fall of Lulzsec has (for the most part) removed these vulnerabilities from the Internet as a whole. These techniques are very dated and will not work on any server that is maintained and/or behind a decent firewall, and your IP will probably get flagged and logged for trying them out. But feel free to set up a server at home and play around. Continue reading “The Dark Arts – Remote File Inclusion”→
It wasn’t too long ago that one could conjecture that most hackers are not avid video game players. We spend most of our free time taking things apart, tinkering with microcontrollers and reading the latest [Jenny List] article on Hackaday.com. When we do think of video games, our neurons generally fire in the direction of emulating a console on a single board computer, such as a Raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone. Or even emulating the actual console processor on an FPGA. Rarely do we venture off into 3D programs meant to make modern video games. If we can’t export an .STL with it, we’re not interested. It’s just not our bag.
Oculus Rift changed this. The VR headset was originally invented for 3D video games, but quickly became a darling to hackers the world over. Virtual Reality technology is far bigger than just video games, and brings opportunity to many fields such as real estate, construction, product visualization, education, social interaction… the list goes on and on.
The Oculus team got together with the folks over at Unity in the early days to make it easy for video game makers to make content for the Rift. Unity is a game engine designed with a shallow learning curve and is available for free for non-commercial use. The Oculus Rift can be integrated into a Unity environment with the check of a setting and importing a small package, available on the Oculus site. This makes it easy for anyone interested in VR technology to get a Rift and start pumping out content.
Hackers have taken things a step further and have written scripts that allow Unity to communicate with an Arduino. VR is fun. But VR plus physical reality is just down right exciting! In this article, we’re going to walk you through setting up your Oculus Rift and Unity game engine to communicate with the outside world via an Arduino.
