Blue Alchemist Promises Rocket Fuel From Moon Dust

September 22, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

Usually when an alchemist shows up promising to turn rocks into gold, you should run the other way. Sure, rocket fuel isn’t gold, but on the moon it’s worth more than its weight in the yellow stuff. So there would be reason to be skeptical if this “Blue Alchemist” was actually an alchemist, and not a chemical reactor under development by the Blue Origin corporation.

The chemistry in question is quite simple, really: take moon dust, which is rich in aluminum silicate minerals, and melt the stuff. Then it’s just a matter of electrolysis to split the elements, collecting the gaseous oxygen for use in your rockets. So: moon dust to air and metals, just add power. Lots and lots of power.

Melting rock takes a lot of temperature, and the molten rock doesn’t electrolyse quite as easily as the water we’re more familiar with splitting. Still, it’s very doable; this is how aluminum is produced on Earth, though notably not from the sorts of minerals you find in moon dust. Given the image accompanying the press release, perhaps on the moon the old expression will be modified to “make oxygen while the sun shines”.

Hackaday wasn’t around to write about it, but forward-looking researchers at NASA, expecting just such a chemical reactor to be developed someday, proposed an Aluminum/Liquid Oxygen slurry monopropellant rocket back in the 1990s.

That’s not likely to be flying any time soon, but of course even with the Methalox rockets in vogue these days, there are appreciable cost savings to leaving your oxygen and home. And we’re not biologists, but maybe Astronauts would like to breathe some of this oxygen stuff? We’ve heard it’s good for your health.

Unobtanium No More; Perhaps We Already Have All The Elements We Need

September 19, 2025 by Jenny List 81 Comments

It’s been a trope of the news cycle over the past decade or so, that there’s some element which we all need but which someone else has the sole supply, and that’s a Bad Thing. It’s been variously lithium, or rare earth elements, and the someone else is usually China, which makes the perfect mix of ingredients for a good media scare story. Sometimes these things cross from the financial pages to the geopolitical stage, even at times being cited in bellicose language. But is there really a shortage?

The Colorado School of Mines say perhaps not, as they’ve released a paper from an American perspective pointing out that the USA already has everything it needs but perhaps doesn’t realize it. We’re surprised it seems to have passed unnoticed in a world preoccupied with such matters.

We’ve covered a few stories about mineral shortages ourselves, and some of them even point to the same conclusion reached by the School of Mines, that those mineral riches lie not in the mines of China but in the waste products closer to American industry. In particular they point to the tailings from existing mines, a waste product of which there is a huge quantity to hand, and which once stripped of the metal they were mined for still contain enough of the sought-after ones to more than satisfy need.

The history of mining from medieval lead miners processing Roman tailings to 19th century gold miners discovering that their tailings were silver ore and on to the present day, includes many similar stories. Perhaps the real story is economic both in the publicity side and the mining side, a good scare story sells papers, and it’s just cheaper to buy your molybdenum from China rather than make your own. We’ll keep you posted if we see news of a tailings bonanza in the Rockies.

When Is Your Pyrex Not The Pyrex You Expect?

September 17, 2025 by Jenny List 22 Comments

It’s not often that Hackaday brings you something from a cooking channel, but [I Want To Cook] has a fascinating look at Pyrex glassware that’s definitely worth watching. If you know anything about Pyrex it’s probably that it’s the glass you’ll see in laboratories and many pieces of cookware, and its special trick is that it can handle high temperatures. The video takes a look at this, and reveals that not all Pyrex is the same.

Pyrex was a Corning product from the early 20th century, and aside from its many laboratory and industrial applications has been the go-to brand for casserole dishes and much more in the kitchen ever since. It’s a borosilicate glass, which is what gives it the special properties, or at least in some cases it used to be a borosilicate glass. It seems that modern-day American Pyrex for the kitchen is instead a soda glass, which while it still makes a fine pie dish, doesn’t quite have the properties of the original.

The video explains some of the differences, as well as revealing that the American version is branded in lower case as pyrex while the European version is branded uppercase as PYREX and retains the borosilicate formulation. Frustratingly there’s no quick way to definitively tell whether a piece of lower-case pyrex is soda glass or not, because the brand switch happened before the formulation switch.

In all probability in the kitchen it makes little difference which version you own, because most users won’t give it the extreme thermal shock required to break the soda version. But some Hackaday readers do plenty of experiments pushing the limits of their glassware, so it’s as well to know that seeking out an older PYREX dish could be a good move.

If you’d like to know more about glass, we’ve got you covered.

Continue reading “When Is Your Pyrex Not The Pyrex You Expect?” →

Perovskite Solar Cell Crystals See The Invisible

September 16, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 14 Comments

A new kind of ‘camera’ is poking at the invisible world of the human body – and it’s made from the same weird crystals that once shook up solar energy. Researchers at Northwestern University and Soochow University have built the first perovskite-based gamma-ray detector that actually works for nuclear medicine imaging, like SPECT scans. This hack is unusual because it takes a once-experimental lab material and shows it can replace multimillion-dollar detectors in real-world hospitals.

Current medical scanners rely on CZT or NaI detectors. CZT is pricey and cracks like ice on a frozen lake. NaI is cheaper, but fuzzy – like photographing a cat through steamed-up glass. Perovskites, however, are easier to grow, cheaper to process, and now proven to detect single photons with record-breaking precision. The team pixelated their crystal like a smartphone camera sensor and pulled crisp 3D images out of faint radiation traces. The payoff: sharper scans, lower radiation doses, and tech that could spread beyond rich clinics.

Perovskite was once typecast as a ‘solar cell wonder,’ but now it’s mutating into a disruptive medical eye. A hack in the truest sense: re-purposing physics for life-saving clarity.

Serious Chemical Threat Sniffer On A Budget

September 16, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 40 Comments

Chemical warfare detection was never supposed to be a hobbyist project. Yet here we are: Air Quality Guardian by [debdoot], the self-proclaimed world’s first open source chemical threat detection system, claims to pack lab-grade sensing into an ESP32-based build for less than $100. Compare that with $10,000+ black-box hardware and you see why this is worth trying at home, even if this project might not have the nut cracked just yet.

Unlike your air monitor from IKEA, the device aims to analyze raw gas sensor resistance – ohm-level data most devices throw away – combined with temporal spikes, humidity correlations, and a database of 35+ signatures. Of course, there is a lot of work to be done here on the calibration side, and we don’t have any chemical warfare agents on hand to test against, so we have no idea how well it works, and we’d expect false positives. Still, the idea of taking a more granular look at the data coming off the sensor may bear some fruit.

(Editor’s note: edited with a hefty dash of skeptical salt.)

Featured Image by Arjun Lama on Unsplash

E-Waste And Waste Oil Combine To Make Silver

September 14, 2025 by Tyler August 12 Comments

As the saying goes, “if it can’t be grown, it has to be mined”– but what about all the metals that have already been wrested from the bosom of the Earth? Once used, they can be recycled– or as this paper charmingly puts it, become ore for “urban mining” techniques. The technique under discussion in the Chemical Engineering Journal is one that extracts metallic silver from e-waste using fatty acids and hydrogen peroxide.

This “graphical abstract” gives the rough idea.

Right now, recycling makes up about 17% of the global silver supply. As rich sources of ore dry up, and the world moves to more sustainable footing, that number can only go up. Recycling e-waste already happens, of course, but in messy, dangerous processes that are generally banned in the developed world. (Like open burning, of plastic, gross.)

This paper describes a “green” process that even the most fervant granola-munching NIMBY wouldn’t mind have in their neighborhood: hot fatty acids (AKA oil) are used as an organic solvent to dissolve metals from PCB and wire. The paper mentions sourcing the solvent from waste sunflower, safflower or canola oil. As you might imagine, most metals, silver included, are not terribly soluble in sunflower oil, but a little refining and the addition of 30% hydrogen peroxide changes that equation.

More than just Ag is picked up in this process, but the oils do select for silver over other metals. The paper presents a way to then selectively precipitate out the silver as silver oleate using ethanol and flourescent light. The oleate compound can then be easily washed and burnt to produce pure silver.

The authors of the paper take the time to demonstrate the process on a silver-plated keyboard connector, so there is proof of concept on real e-waste. Selecting for silver means leaving behind gold, however, so we’re not sure how the economics of this method will stack up.

Of course, when Hackaday talks about recycling e-waste, it’s usually more on the “reuse” part of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. After all, one man’s e-waste is another man’s parts bin–or priceless historical artifact.

Thanks to [Brian] for the tip.Your tips can be easily recycled into Hackaday posts through an environmentally-friendly process via our tipsline.

How Strong Of A Redbull Can You Make?

September 12, 2025 by Fenix Guthrie 38 Comments

Energy drinks are a staple of those who want to get awake and energetic in a hurry. But what if said energy is not in enough of a hurry for your taste? After coming across a thrice concentrated energy drink, [Nile Blue] decided to make a 100 times concentrated Redbull.

Energy drinks largely consist of water with caffeine, flavoring and sugar dissolved inside. Because a solution can only be so strong, so instead of normal Redbull, a sugar free variant was used. All 100 cans were gathered into a bucket to dry the mixture, but first, it had to be de-carbonated. By attaching a water agitator to a drill, all the carbon dioxide diffused in the water fell out of solution. A little was lost, but the process worked extremely well.

Continue reading “How Strong Of A Redbull Can You Make?” →