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Longform articles, the best of what the Hackaday writing crew has to offer.

Coronavirus Testing: Just The Facts

March 24, 2020 by 42 Comments

The news these days is dominated by the one big story: the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the first reports of infection surfaced in China sometime in late 2019, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease, bloodlessly dubbed SARS-CoV-19, has swept around the globe destroying lives, livelihoods, and economies. Getting a handle on the disease has required drastic actions by governments and sacrifices by citizens as we try to slow the rate of infection

As with all infectious diseases, getting ahead of COVID-19 is a numbers game. To fight the spread of the virus, we need to know who has it, where they are, where they’ve been, and whom they’ve had contact with. If we are unable to gather the information needed to isolate potential carriers, all that we can do is impose mass quarantines and hope for the best. Hence the need for mass COVID-19 testing, and the understandable hue and cry about its slow pace and the limited availability of test kits.

But what exactly do these test kits contain? What makes mass testing so difficult to implement? As we shall see, COVID-19 testing is anything but simple, even if the underlying technology, PCR, is well-understood and readily available. A lot of the bottlenecks are, as usual, bureaucratic, but there are technical limits too. Luckily, there are clever ways around those restrictions, but understanding the basics of COVID-19 testing is the best place to start.

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The New Xbox: Just How Fast Is 12 TeraFLOPS?

March 23, 2020 by 73 Comments

Microsoft’s new Xbox Series X, formerly known as Project Scarlet, is slated for release in the holiday period of 2020. Like any new console release, it promises better graphics, more immersive gameplay, and all manner of other superlatives in the press releases. In a sharp change from previous generations, however, suddenly everybody is talking about FLOPS. Let’s dive in and explore what this means, and what bearing it has on performance.

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Coronavirus And Folding@Home; More On How Your Computer Helps Medical Research

March 22, 2020 by 56 Comments

On Wednesday morning we asked the Hackaday community to donate their extra computer cycles for Coronavirus research. On Thursday morning the number of people contributing to Team Hackaday had doubled, and on Friday it had doubled again. Thank you for putting those computers to work in pursuit of drug therapies for COVID-19.

I’m writing today for two reasons, we want to keep up this trend, and also answer some of the most common questions out there. Folding@Home (FAH) is an initiative that simulates proteins associated with several diseases, searching for indicators that will help medical researchers identify treatments. These are complex problems and your efforts right now are incredibly important to finding treatments faster. FAH loads the research pipeline, generating a data set that researchers can then follow in every step of the process, from identifying which chemical compounds may be effective and how to deliver them, to testing they hypothesis and moving toward human trials.

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Thousands Of Internet-Connected Satellites Above Us, What Could Possibly Go Wrong!

March 19, 2020 by 55 Comments

Our skies are full of satellites, more full than they have been, that is, because SpaceX’s Starlink and a bevvy of other soon-to-launch operators plan to fill them with thousands of small low-earth-orbit craft to blanket the Earth with satellite Internet coverage. Astronomers are horrified at such an assault on their clear skies, space-watchers are fascinated by the latest developments, and in some quarters they’re causing a bit of concern about the security risk they might present. With a lot of regrettable overuse use of the word “hacker”, the concern is that such a large number of craft in the heavens might present an irresistible target for bad actors, who would proceed to steer them into each other can cause chaos.

Invest in undersea cables, folks, the Kessler Syndrome is upon us, we’re doomed!

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Teardown: Cobra XRS 9740 Radar Detector

March 18, 2020 by 46 Comments

Drivers with a lead foot more often than not have Waze open on their phone so they can see if other drivers have spotted cops up ahead. But avoiding a speeding ticket used to involve a lot more hardware than software. Back before the smartphone revolution, that same driver would have had a radar detector on their dashboard. That’s not to say the gadgets are completely unused today, but between their relatively high cost (one of the top rated models on Amazon as of this writing costs over $300) and the inevitable false positives from so many vehicles on the road having their own radar and LIDAR systems, they’ve certainly become a less common sight over the years

The subject of today’s teardown is a perfect example of “Peak Radar Detector”. Manufactured back in 2007, the Cobra XRS 9740 would have been a fairly mid-range entry offering the sort of features that would have been desirable at the time. Over a decade ago, having an alphanumeric display, voice alerts, and a digital compass were all things worth shouting about on the box the thing was sold in. Though looking like some kind of Cardassian warship was apparently just an added bonus.

As the name implies these devices are primarily for detecting radar activity, but by this point they’d also been expanded to pick up infrared lasers and the strobe beacons on emergency vehicles. But false positives were always a problem, so the device allows the user to select which signals it should be on the lookout for. If you were getting some kind of interference that convinced the detector it was being bombarded with IR lasers, you could just turn that function off without having to pull the plug entirely.

But it’s important to remember that this device was built back when people were still unironically carrying around flip phones. Detecting laser and multi-band radars might sound like something pulled from the spec sheet of a stealth fighter jet, but this is still a piece of consumer electronics from more than a decade in the past. So let’s crack it open and take a look at what goes on inside a radar detector that’s only a few years away from being old enough to get its own driver’s license.

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Northrop Grumman Tests Space Tow Truck

March 17, 2020 by 33 Comments

In the early days, satellites didn’t stick around for very long. After it was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, it only took about three months for Sputnik 1 to renter the atmosphere and burn up. But the constant drive to push ever further into space meant that soon satellites would remain in orbit for years at a time. Not that they always functioned for that long; America’s Explorer 1 remained in orbit for more than twelve years, but its batteries died after just four months.

Of course back then, nobody was too worried about that sort of thing. When you can count the number of spacecraft in Earth orbit on one hand, what does it matter if one of them stays up there for more than a decade? The chances of a collision were so low as to essentially be impossible, and if the satellite was dead and wasn’t interfering with communication to its functional peers, all the better.

The likelihood of a collision steadily increased over the years as more and more spacecraft were launched, but the cavalier approach to space stewardship continued more or less unchanged into the modern era. In fact, it might have endured a few more decades if companies like SpaceX weren’t planning on mega-constellations comprised of thousands of individual satellites. Concerned over jamming up valuable near-Earth orbits with so much “space junk”, modern satellites are increasingly being designed with automatic disposal systems that help make sure they are safely deorbited even in the event of a system failure.

That’s good news for the future, but it doesn’t help us with the current situation. Thousands of satellites are in orbit above the planet, and they’ll need to be dealt with in the coming years. The good news is that many of them are at a low enough altitude that they’ll burn up on their own eventually, and methods are being developed to speed up the process should it be necessary to hasten their demise.

Unfortunately, the situation is slightly more complex with communications satellites in geosynchronous orbits. At an altitude of 35,786 kilometers (22,236 miles), deorbiting these spacecraft simply isn’t practical. It’s actually far easier to maneuver them farther out into space where they’ll never return. But what if the satellite fails or runs out of propellant before the decision to retire it can be made?

That’s precisely the sort of scenario the Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) was developed for, and after a historic real-world test in February, it looks like this “Space Tow Truck” might be exactly what we need to make sure invaluable geosynchronous orbits are protected in the coming decades.

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Where Do You Get Your Neutrons? Neutron Sources For Nuclear Fusion, Science, Medicine, And Industry

March 16, 2020 by 27 Comments

All of us probably know what neutrons are, or have at least heard of them back in physics class. Yet these little bundles of quarks are much more than just filler inside an atom’s nucleus. In addition to being an essential part of making matter as stable as it (usually) is, free neutrons can be used in a variety of manners.

From breaking atoms apart (nuclear fission), to changing the composition of atoms by adding neutrons (transmutation), to the use of neutrons in detecting water and inspecting materials, neutrons are an essential tool in the sciences, as well as in medicine and industrial applications. This has meant a lot of development toward the goal of better neutron sources. While nuclear fission is an efficient way to get lots of neutrons, for most applications a more compact and less complicated approach is used, some of which use nuclear fusion instead.

In this article we’ll be taking a look at the many applications of neutron sources, and these neutron sources themselves.

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