Thomas Edison May Have Discovered Graphene

January 31, 2026 by 13 Comments

Thomas Edison is well known for his inventions (even if you don’t agree he invented all of them). However, he also occasionally invented things he didn’t understand, so they had to be reinvented again later. The latest example comes from researchers at Rice University. While building a replica light bulb, they found that Thomas Edison may have accidentally created graphene while testing the original article.

Today, we know that applying a voltage to a carbon-based resistor and heating it up to over 2,000 °C can create turbostratic graphene. Edison used a carbon-based filament and could heat it to over 2,000 °C.

This reminds us of how, in the 1880s, Edison observed current flowing in one direction through a test light bulb that included a plate. However, he thought it was just a curiosity. It would be up to Fleming, in 1904, to figure it out and understand what could be done with it.

Naturally, Edison wouldn’t have known to look for graphene, how to look for it, or what to do with it if he found it. But it does boggle the mind to think about graphene appearing many decades earlier. Or maybe it would still be looking for a killer use. Certainly, as the Rice researchers note, this is one of the easier ways to make graphene.

X-Cube Prism Becomes Dichroic Disco Ball

January 28, 2026 by 13 Comments

You’ve likely seen an X-cube, a dichroic prism used to split light into its constituent colours–you know, those fun little cubes you get when tearing apart a broken projector. Have you considered that the X-cube need not be a cube for its entire existence? [Matt] at “Matt’s Corner of Gem Cutting” on YouTube absolutely did, which is why he ground one into a 216-facet disco ball. 

That’s the hack, really. He took something many of us have played with at our desks thinking “I should do something cool with this” and… did something cool with it that most of us lack the tools and especially skills to even consider. It’s not especially practical, but it is especially pretty. Art, in other words.

The shape he’s using is known specifically to gemologists as “Santa’s Little Helper II” though we’d probably describe it as a kind of isosphere. Faceting the cube is just a matter of grinding down the facets to create the isosphere, then polishing them to brilliance with increasingly finer grit. This is done one hemisphere at a time, so the other hemisphere can be safely held in place with the now-classic cyanoacrylate and baking soda composite. Yes, jewelers use that trick, too.

We were slightly worried when [Matt] dumped his finished disco ball in acetone to clean off the cyanoacrylate– we haven’t the foggiest idea what optical-quality glue is used to hold the four prisms of an X-cube together and were a little worried acetone might soften the joints. That turned out not to be an issue, and [Matt] now has the most eye-catching sun-catcher we think we’ve ever seen.

We actually have seen suncatchers before, though admittedly it’s not a very popular tag around here. The closest build to this one was a so-called “hypercrystal” that combined an infinitiy mirror with a crystaline shape and dicloric tape for an effect as trippy as it sounds.

We also featured a deep-dive a while back if you want to know how these colourful, hard-to-pronounce coatings work.

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The Strange Depression Switch Discovered Deep Inside The Brain

November 10, 2025 by 49 Comments

As humans, we tend to consider our emotional states as a direct response to the experiences of our lives. Traffic may make us frustrated, betrayal may make us angry, or the ever-grinding wear of modern life might make us depressed.

Dig into the science of the brain, though, and one must realize that our emotional states are really just electrical signals zinging around our neurons. And as such, they can even be influenced by direct electrical stimulation.

One group of researchers found this out when they inadvertently discovered a “switch” that induced massive depression in a patient in mere seconds. For all the complexities of the human psyche, a little electricity proved more than capable of swaying it in an instant.

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Site Of Secret 1950s Cold War Iceworm Project Rediscovered

October 17, 2025 by 9 Comments

The overall theme of the early part of the Cold War was that of subterfuge — with scientific missions often providing excellent cover for placing missiles right on the USSR’s doorstep. Recently NASA rediscovered Camp Century, while testing a airplane-based synthetic aperture radar instrument (UAVSAR) over Greenland. Although established on the surface in 1959 as a polar research site, and actually producing good science from e.g. ice core samples, beneath this benign surface was the secretive Project Iceworm.

By 1967 the base was forced to be abandoned due to shifting ice caps, which would eventually bury the site under over 30 meters of ice. Before that, the scientists would test out the PM-2A small modular reactor. It not only provided 2 MW of electrical power and heat to the base, but was itself subjected to various experiments. Alongside this public face, Project Iceworm sought to set up a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites for Minuteman missiles. These would be located below the ice sheet, capable of surviving a first strike scenario by the USSR. A lack of Danish permission, among other complications, led to the project eventually being abandoned.

It was this base that popped up during the NASA scan of the ice bed. Although it was thought that the crushed remains would be safely entombed, it’s estimated that by the year 2100 global warming will have led to the site being exposed again, including the thousands of liters of diesel and tons of hazardous waste that were left behind back in 1967. The positive news here is probably that with this SAR instrument we can keep much better tabs on the condition of the site as the ice cap continues to grind it into a fine paste.

Top image: Camp Century in happier times. (Source: US Army, Wikimedia)

Playing DOOM In Discord With A Special Image URL

September 28, 2025 by 4 Comments

Can you play DOOM in Discord? At first glance, that may seem rather nonsensical, as Discord is a proprietary chat service and neither a hardware device nor something else that may seem like an obvious target for being (ab)used for demon-shooting points. That is, until you look at Discord’s content embedding feature. This is where [PortalRunner]’s Doomcord hack comes into play, allowing you to play the entire game in a Discord client by submitting text messages after embedding a very special image URL.

Rather than this embedding being done in the client as done with e.g., IRC clients, the Discord backend handles the content fetching, caching, and handing off to clients. This system can easily be used with an animated GIF of gameplay, but having it be seen as a GIF file required adding .gif to the end of the URL to trick Discord’s backend into not simply turning it into a static PNG. After this, Discord’s throttling of message speed turned out to kill the concept of real-time gameplay, along with the server load.

Plan C thus morphed into using Chocolate Doom headless, rendering gameplay into cached video files by using the demo gameplay feature in DOOM. The Doomcord server template project provides a server if you want to give it a whirl yourself. Since this uses recorded gameplay, the switch was made from GIF to the WEBP format to save space, along with a cache expiry system. Just level 1 with all possible input sequences takes up 12 TB of disk space.

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Rediscovering Microsoft’s Oddball Music Generator From The 1990s

August 14, 2025 by 8 Comments

There has been a huge proliferation in AI music creation tools of late, and a corresponding uptick in the number of AI artists appearing on streaming services. Well before the modern neural network revolution, though, there was an earlier tool in this same vein. [harke] tells us all about Microsoft Music Producer 1.0, a forgotten relic from the 1990s.

The software wasn’t ever marketed openly. Instead, it was a part of Microsoft Visual InterDev, a web development package from 1997. It allowed the user to select a style, a personality, and a band to play the song, along with details like key, tempo, and the “shape” of the composition. It would then go ahead and algorithmically generate the music using MIDI instruments and in-built synthesized sounds.

As [harke] demonstrates, there are a huge amounts of genres to choose from. Pick one, and you’ll most likely find it sounds nothing like the contemporary genre it’s supposed to be recreating. The more gamey genres, though, like “Adventure” or “Chase” actually sound pretty okay. The moods are hilariously specific, too — you can have a “noble” song, or a “striving” or “serious” one. [harke] also demonstrates building a full song with the “7AM Illusion” preset, exporting the MIDI, and then adding her own instruments and vocals in a DAW to fill it out. The result is what you’d expect from a composition relying on the Microsoft GS Wavetable synth.

Microsoft might not have cornered the generative music market in the 1990s, but generative AI is making huge waves in the industry today.

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End Of The Eternal September, As AOL Discontinues Dial-Up

August 11, 2025 by 38 Comments

If you used the internet at home a couple of decades or more ago, you’ll know the characteristic sound of a modem  connecting to its dial-up server. That noise is a thing of the past, as we long ago moved to fibre, DSL, or wireless providers that are always on. It’s a surprise then to read that AOL are discontinuing their dial-up service at the end of September this year, in part for the reminder that AOL are still a thing, and for the surprise that in 2025 they still operate a dial-up service.

There was a brief period in which instead of going online via the internet itself, the masses were offered online services through walled gardens of corporate content. Companies such as AOL and Compuserve bombarded consumers with floppies and CD-ROMs containing their software, and even Microsoft dipped a toe in the market with the original MSN service before famously pivoting the whole organisation in favour of the internet in mid 1995. Compuserve was absorbed by AOL, which morphed into the most popular consumer dial-up ISP over the rest of that decade. The dotcom boom saw them snapped up for an exorbitant price by Time Warner, only for the expected bonanza to never arrive, and by 2023 the AOL name was dropped from the parent company’s letterhead. Over the next decade it dwindled into something of an irrelevance, and is now owned by Yahoo! as a content and email portal. This dial-up service seems to have been the last gasp of its role as an ISP.

So the eternal September, so-called because the arrival of AOL users on Usenet felt like an everlasting version of the moment a fresh cadre of undergrads arrived in September, may at least in an AOL sense, finally be over. If you’re one of the estimated 0.2% of Americans still using a dial-up connection don’t despair, because there are a few other ISPs still (just) serving your needs.