New Supermaterial: As Strong As Steel And As Light As Styrofoam

May 27, 2025 by John Elliot V 64 Comments

Today in material science news we have a report from [German Science Guy] about a new supermaterial which is as strong as steel and as light as Styrofoam!

A supermaterial is a type of material that possesses remarkable physical properties, often surpassing traditional materials in strength, conductivity, or other characteristics. Graphene, for example, is considered a supermaterial because it is extremely strong, lightweight, and has excellent electrical conductivity.

This new supermaterial is a carbon nanolattice which has been developed by researchers from Canada and South Korea, and it has remarkably high strength and remarkably low weight. Indeed this new material achieved the compressive strength of carbon steels (180-360 MPa) with the density of Styrofoam (125-215 kg m^-3).

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Camera is seen on the left with an Arduino connected to the right

Look To The Sky With This Simple Plane Tracker

May 27, 2025 by Ian Bos 12 Comments

Do you ever get tired of stressing your neck looking for planes in the sky? Worry not! Here is a neat and cheap Arduino/Ras Pi project to keep your neck sore free! [BANK ANGLE] presents a wonderfully simple plane tracking system using an affordable camera and basic microcontrollers.

The bulk of the system relies on a cheap rotating security camera that gets dissected to reveal its internals. Here stepper control wires can be found and connected to the control boards required to allow an Arduino nano to tell the motors when and where to spin. Of course, the camera system doesn’t just look everywhere until it finds a plane, a Raspberry Pi takes in data from local ADS-B data to know where a nearby plane is.

After that, all that’s left is a nifty overlay to make the professional look. Combining all these creates a surprisingly capable system that gives information on the aircraft’s azimuth, elevation, and distance.

If you want to try your hand at making your own version of [BLANK ANGLE]’s tracker, check out his GitHub page. Of course, tracking planes gets boring after a while so why not try tracking something higher with this open-source star tracker?

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Hand Truck Turned Into Motorcycle

May 27, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

For those motorcyclists looking to get a classic American-style cruiser, often the go-to brand is Harley-Davidson. However, these bikes not only have reputations for being stuck in the past, both in terms of design and culture, but they also tend to be extremely expensive—not only upfront, but in maintenance as well. If you want the style without all of that baggage, you might want to try out something like this custom motorcycle which not only looks the part, it reduces those costs by being built around a hand truck.

By the end of the project, though, the hand truck does not retain much of its original form or function. [Garage Avenger] has cut and welded it essentially into a custom frame for the diminutive motorcycle, while retaining much of its original look and feel. Keeping up with the costs savings aspect of this project, the four-stroke engine was free, although it did take some wrenching to get it running and integrated into the frame. A custom axle, a front end from another bike, a gas tank from an online retailer (that needed re-welding), and some wiring finishes out the build.

With a fresh paint job to match the original color of the hand truck, it’s off to the track. Of course it doesn’t have quite the performance of most street legal motorcycles, including some quirks with the handling and braking, but for the trails around [Garage Avenger]’s home it’s certainly a fun transportation mode he can add to his repertoire. If this is your first time seeing one of his projects, be sure to check out his other work including this drifting shopping cart and this turbine-powered sled.

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2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Fytó – Turn Your Plant Into A Pet

May 27, 2025 by Matt Varian 2 Comments

This entry into the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest is about bringing some fun feedback to normally silent plants. Fytó integrates sensors and displays into a 3D printed planter. The sensors read the various environmental and soil conditions that the plant is experiencing, and give you feedback about them via a series of playful expressive faces that are displayed on the screen embedded in the planter.

At the core of the Fytó is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which has plenty of power to display the animations while also being small enough to easily fit inside the planter without it growing in size much more than a normal planter would be. The sensors include a capacitive soil moisture sensor, a temperature sensor, and a light-dependent resistor. These sensors all provide analog outputs to relay their measurements and so there was an ADS1115 analog-to-digital converter board also included as the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have the required analog pins to communicate with them.

The fun animated faces are displayed with a 2-inch LCD display embedded in the planter. A small acrylic cover is placed in front of the LCD to help ease the transition from the printed planter to the internally mounted screen. The temperature and light sensors were also placed in openings around the planter to ensure they could get good environmental readings. There are six expressions the Fytó can express based on its sensor readings, ranging from happy when all the readings are in a good zone, to thirsty if it needs water or freezing when it’s too cold. Be sure to check out the other entries in the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest.

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Fixing A Fatal Genetic Defect In Babies With A Bit Of Genetic Modification

May 27, 2025 by Maya Posch 30 Comments

Genetic defects are exceedingly common, which is not surprising considering just how many cells make up our bodies, including our reproductive cells. While most of these defects have no or only minor effects, some range from serious to fatal. One of these defects is in the CPS1 gene, with those affected facing a shortened lifespan along with intensive treatments and a liver transplant as the only real solution. This may now be changing, after the first successful genetic treatment of an infant with CPS1 deficiency.

Carbamoyl phosphate synthetase I (CPS1) is an enzyme that is crucial for breaking down the ammonia that is formed when proteins are broken down. If the body doesn’t produce enough of this enzyme in the liver, ammonia will accumulate in the blood, eventually reaching levels where it will affect primarily the nervous system. As an autosomal recessive metabolic disorder it requires both parents to be carriers, with the severity depending on the exact mutation.

In the case of the affected infant, KJ Muldoon, the CPS1 deficiency was severe with only a low-protein diet and ammonia-lowering (nitrogen scavenging) medication keeping the child alive while a search for a donor liver had begun. It is in this context that in a few months time a CRISPR-Cas9 therapy was developed that so far appears to fixing the faulty genes in the liver cells.

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Reconditioning A Vintage CRT Tube

May 27, 2025 by Jenny List 28 Comments

Plenty of readers will be familiar with CRT televisions, not least because many of us use them with retrocomputers and consoles. But perhaps fewer will have worked with CRTs themselves as components, and of those, fewer still will be familiar with the earlier generation of tubes. In the first few decades of color TV the tubes were so-called delta gun because their three electron guns were arranged in a triangular form. [Colorvac] has put up a video in which they demonstrate the reconditioning of one of these tubes from a late-1960s Nordmende TV.

The tube in question isn’t one of the earlier “roundies” you would find on an American color TV from the ’50s or early ’60s, instead it’s one of the first generation of rectangular (ish) screens. It’s got an under-performing blue gun, so they’re replacing the electron gun assembly. Cutting the neck of the tube, bonding a new neck extension, and sealing in a new gun assembly is not for the faint-hearted, and it’s clear they have both the specialist machinery and the experience required for the job. Finally we see the reconditioned tube put back into the chassis, and are treated to a demonstration of converging the three beams.

For those of us who cut our teeth on these devices, it’s fascinating.

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Hands-On: EufyMake E1 UV Printer

May 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi 50 Comments

The modern hacker and maker has a truly incredible arsenal of tools at their disposal. High-tech tools like 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC routers have all become commonplace, and combined with old standbys like the drill press and mini lathe, it sometimes seems like we’ve finally peaked in terms of what the individual is realistically capable of producing in their own home. But occasionally a new tool comes along, and it makes us realize that there are still avenues unexplored for the home gamer.

After spending the last few weeks playing with it, I can confidently say the eufyMake E1 UV printer is one of those tools. The elevator pitch is simple: with a UV printer, you can print anything on anything. As you can imagine, the reality is somewhat more complex, but the fact that you can toss a three dimensional object in the chamber and spray it with a high-resolution color image with a few button presses holds incredible creative potential. Enough that the Kickstarter for the $1,700 printer has already raised a mind-boggling $27 million at the time of this writing, with more than a month yet to go before crossing the finish line.

If you’re on the fence about backing the campaign, or just have doubts about whether or not the machine can do what eufyMake claims, I’ll put those concerns to rest right now — it’s the real deal. Even after using the machine for as long as I have, each time a print job ends, I find myself momentary taken aback by just how good the end result is. The technology inside this machine that not only makes these results possible, but makes them so easily obtainable, is truly revolutionary.

That being said, it’s not a perfect machine by any stretch of the imagination. While I never ran into an outright failure while using the eufyMake E1, there’s a fairly long list of issues which I’d like to see addressed. Some of them are simple tweaks which may well get sorted out before the product starts shipping this summer, while others are fundamental to the way the machine operates and could represent an opportunity for competitors.

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