When we talk about emissions these days, we typically talk about cutting them back for the good of the environment. However, the climate system is a complex beast, and one we’re still learning to understand.
As it turns out, cutting back on emissions may have unexpected or undesirable effects. Some scientists are concerned that cuts to human-induced sulfur emissions may actually be warming the Earth.
Continue reading “Reduced Sulfur Emissions Could Cause Climate Shock”
To some folx, puzzles are the ultimate single-player game, but to others, they are like getting a single Tootsie Roll on Halloween. [Shane] of Stuff Made Here must fall into the latter category because he spent the equivalent of 18 work-weeks to make a robot that solves them automatically. Shots have been fired in the war on puzzles.
The goal of this robot is to beat a hybrid idea of two devilish puzzles. The first is all-white which could be solved by taking a piece at random and then checking its compatibility with every unsolved piece. The second is a 5000-piece monster painted white. There is a Moby Dick theme here. Picking up pieces like a human with fingers is out of the question, but pick-and-place machines solved this long ago, and we learn a cool lesson about how shop-air can create negative pressure. Suction. We wonder if anyone ever repurposed canned air to create a vacuum cleaner.
The meat of this video is overcoming hurdles, like a rhomboidal gantry table, helping machine vision see puzzle pieces accurately, and solving a small puzzle. [Shane] explains the solutions with the ear of someone with a technical background but at a high enough level that anyone can learn something. All the moving parts are in place, but the processing power to decode the puzzle is orders of magnitude higher than consumer machines, so that will wait for part two.
When we think of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that use electrodes, we usually think of Utah arrays that are placed directly on the brain during open brain surgery, or with thin electrodes spliced into the exposed brain as postulated by Neuralink. While Utah arrays and kin as a practical concept date back to the 1980s, a more recent concept called Stentrodes – for stent-electrode array – seeks to do away with the need for invasive brain surgery.
As the name suggests, this approach uses stents that are inserted via the blood vessels, where they are expanded and thus firmly placed inside a blood vessel inside the brain. Since each of these stents also features an electrode array, these can be used to record neural activity in nearby neural clusters, as well as induce activity through electrical stimulation.
Due to the fact that stents are already commonly used by themselves in the brain’s blood vessels, and the relatively benign nature of these electrode arrays, human trials have already been approved in 2018 by an ethics committee in Australia. Despite lingering concerns about the achievable resolution and performance of this approach, it may offer hope to millions of people suffering from paralysis and other conditions.
Continue reading “Stentrodes: A Way To Insert Brain Electrodes Without Invasive Surgery”
How expensive is it to make a panel that uses e-ink technology? That might depend on how flexible you are. [RBarron] read about reverse engineering point-of-sale shelf labels and found them on eBay for just over a buck apiece. Next thing you know, 20 of them were working together in a single panel.
The panels use RF or NFC programming, normally, but have the capability to use BLE. Naturally you could just address each one in turn, but that isn’t very efficient. The approach here is to use one label as a BLE controller and it then drives the other displays in a serial daisy chain, where each label’s receive pin is set to the previous label’s transmit pin.
That allows a simple piece of code to read incoming messages and process the ones addressed to that label. Anything else just gets sent out the serial port. Only the BLE node has special firmware. At first, we thought each label would need an address and we wondered how it would be set other than having unique firmware for each one since there doesn’t appear to be a handy way to do a hardware-based configuration.
The actual solution is clever. Each message has a hop counter that each node decrements before passing the message along the chain. When the hop count is zero, the message is at its destination. Simple and very easy to configure. In theory, you could replace any of the labels after the first one with any other label and the system would still work correctly.
Even the wiring is clever, with a jig to bend the wire to ensure even spacing of each element on the panel. A laser-cut box finishes the project off nicely. The code is all available on GitHub. We’ve seen these kinds of tags used for things like weather stations. Not to mention conference badges.
Mechanizing the production of textiles was a major part of the industrial revolution, and with the convenience of many people are recreating the classic machines. A perfect example of this is [Fraens]’ 3D printed braiding machine, which was reverse engineered from old photos of the early machines.
The trick behind braiding is the mesmerizing path the six bobbins need to weave around each other while maintaining the correct tension on the strands. To achieve this, they slide along a path in a guide plate while being passed between a series of guide gears for each section of the track. [Fraens] cut the guide plate components and the base plate below it from acrylic and mounted them together with standoffs to allow space for the guide gears.
Each of the six bobbins contains multiple parts to maintain the correct tension. The strands are fed through a single guide ring, where the braid is formed, and through pair of traction gears. All the moving parts are driven by a single 24 V motor and can produce about 42 cm of a braided cord per minute, and you can even set up the machine to braid around an inner core.
This braiding machine is just one in a series of early industrial machines recreated by [Fraens] using 3D printing. The others include a sewing machine, and a power loom, and a generator.
Continue reading “3D Printed Braiding Machine Brings Back Some History”
Brass plaques are eye-catching because no one makes them on a whim. They are more costly than wood or plastic, and processing them is proportionally difficult. [Becky Stern] picked the medium to honor her brother, who enjoyed coffee, motorcycles, and making things by hand. She made some playing card-sized pieces to adorn his favorite brand of hot bean juice and a large one to hang at his memorial site.
The primary components are a vertical salt water bath, DC power supply, metal to etch, scrap steel approximately the same size, and a water agitator, which in this case is an air pump and diffuser stone. You could stir manually for two hours and binge your shows but trust us and take the easy route. The video doesn’t explicitly call for flexible wires, but [Becky] wisely selected some high-strand hook-up leads, which will cause fewer headaches as stiff copper has a mind of its own, and you don’t want the two sides colliding.
There are a couple of ways to transfer an insulating mask to metal, and we see the ole’ magazine paper method fail in the video, but cutting vinyl works a treat. You may prefer lasers or resin printers, and that’s all right too. Once your mask is sorted, connect the positive lead to the brass and the negative to your steel. Now, it’s into the agitated salt water bath, apply direct current, and allow electricity to immortalize your design.
On Star Trek, if you want to go from one deck to another, you enter a “turbolift” and tell it where you want to go. However, many people have speculated that one day you’ll ride an elevator to orbit instead of using a relatively crude rocket. The idea is simple. If you had a tether anchored on the Earth with the other end connected to a satellite, you could simply move up and down the tether. Sound simple, so what’s the problem? The tether has to withstand enormous forces, and we don’t know how to make anything practical that could survive it. However, a team at the International Space Elevator Consortium could have the answer: graphene ribbons.
The concept is not new, but the hope of any practical material able to hold up to the strain has been scant. [Arthur C. Clarke] summed it up in 1979:
How close are we to achieving this with known materials? Not very. The best steel wire could manage only a miserable 31 mi (50 km) or so of vertical suspension before it snapped under its own weight. The trouble with metals is that, though they are strong, they are also heavy; we want something that is both strong and light. This suggests that we should look at modern synthetic and composite materials. Kevlar… for example, could sustain a vertical length of 124 mi (200 km) before snapping – impressive, but still totally inadequate compared with the 3,100 (5,000 km) needed.
Continue reading “Next Floor: Geosynchronous Satellites, Orbiting Laboratories”
