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

Mapping The Human Brain And Where This May Lead Us

May 23, 2024 by 31 Comments

In order to understand something, it helps to observe it up close and study its inner workings. This is no less true for the brain, whether it is the brain of a mouse, that of a whale, or the squishy brain inside our own skulls. It defines after all us as a person; containing our personality and all our desires and dreams. There are also many injuries, disorders and illnesses that affect the brain, many of which we understand as poorly as the basics of how memories are stored and thoughts are formed. Much of this is due to how complicated the brain is to study in a controlled fashion.

Recently a breakthrough was made in the form of a detailed map of the cells and synapses in a segment of a human brain sample. This collaboration between Harvard and Google resulted in the most detailed look at human brain tissue so far, contained in a mere 1.4 petabytes of data. Far from a full brain map, this particular effort involved only a cubic millimeter of the human temporal cortex, containing 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels and 150 million synapses.

Ultimately the goal is to create a full map of a human brain like this, with each synapse and other structures detailed. If we can pull it off, the implications could be mind-bending.

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Nuclear Fusion R&D In 2024: Getting Down To The Gritty Details

May 22, 2024 by 42 Comments

To those who have kept tabs on nuclear fusion research the past decades beyond the articles and soundbites in news outlets, it’s probably clear just how much progress has been made, and how many challenges still remain. Yet since not that many people are into plasma physics, every measure of progress, such as most recently by the South Korean KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research) tokamak, is met generally by dismissive statements about nuclear fusion always being a certain number of decades away. Looking beyond this in coverage such as the article by Science Alert about this achievement by KSTAR we can however see quite a few of these remaining challenges being touched upon.

Recently KSTAR managed to generate 100 million degrees C plasma and maintain this for 48 seconds, a significant boost over its previous record from 2021 of 30 seconds, partially due to the new divertors that were installed. These divertors are essential for removing impurities from the plasma, yet much like the inner wall of the reactor vessel, these plasma-facing materials (PFM) bear the brunt of the super-hot plasma and any plasma instabilities, as well as the constant neutron flux from the fusion products. KSTAR now features tungsten divertors, which has become a popular material choice for this component.

Researching the optimal PFMs, as well as plasma containment modes and methods to suppress plasma instabilities are just some of the challenges that form the road still ahead before commercial fusion can commence.

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A thickness gauge, letter scale, push stick, and dial caliper

Measure Three Times, Design Once

May 16, 2024 by 35 Comments

Most of the Hackaday community would never wire a power supply to a circuit without knowing the expected voltage and the required current. But our mechanical design is often more bodged. We meet folks who carefully budget power to their microcontroller, sensors, and so on, but never measure the forces involved in their mechanical designs. Then they’re surprised when the motor they chose isn’t big enough for the weight of their robot.

An obstacle to being more numbers oriented is lack of basic data about the system. So, here are some simple tools for measuring dynamic properties of small mechanisms; distances, forces, velocities, accelerations, torques, and other things you haven’t thought about since college physics. If you don’t have these in your toolkit, how do you measure?

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A Slice Of Simulation, Google Sheets Style

May 15, 2024 by 9 Comments

Have you ever tried to eat one jelly bean or one potato chip? It is nearly impossible. Some of us have the same problem with hardware projects. It all started when I wrote about the old bitslice chips people used to build computers before you could easily get a whole CPU on a chip. Bitslice is basically Lego blocks that build CPUs. I have always wanted to play with technology, so when I wrote that piece, I looked on eBay to see if I could find any leftovers from this 1970-era tech. It turns out that the chips are easy to find, but I found something even better. A mint condition AM2900 evaluation board. These aren’t easy to find, so the chances that you can try one out yourself are pretty low. But I’m going to fix that, virtually speaking.

This was just the second potato chip. Programming the board, as you can see in the video below, is tedious, with lots of binary switch-flipping. To simplify things, I took another potato chip — a Google Sheet that generates the binary from a quasi-assembly language. That should have been enough, but I had to take another chip from the bag. I extended the spreadsheet to actually emulate the system. It is a terrible hack, and Google Sheets’ performance for this sort of thing could be better. But it works.

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You’ve Probably Never Considered Taking An Airship To Orbit

May 13, 2024 by 75 Comments

There have been all kinds of wild ideas to get spacecraft into orbit. Everything from firing huge cannons to spinning craft at rapid speed has been posited, explored, or in some cases, even tested to some degree. And yet, good ol’ flaming rockets continue to dominate all, because they actually get the job done.

Rockets, fuel, and all their supporting infrastructure remain expensive, so the search for an alternative goes on. One daring idea involves using airships to loft payloads into orbit. What if you could simply float up into space?

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The Great Green Wall: Africa’s Ambitious Attempt To Fight Desertification

May 9, 2024 by 61 Comments

As our climate changes, we fear that warmer temperatures and drier conditions could make life hard for us. In most locations, it’s a future concern that feels uncomfortably near, but for some locations, it’s already very real. Take the Sahara desert, for example, and the degraded landscapes to the south in the Sahel. These arid regions are so dry that they struggle to support life at all, and temperatures there are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet.

In the face of this escalating threat, one of the most visionary initiatives underway is the Great Green Wall of Africa. It’s a mega-sized project that aims to restore life to barren terrain.

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Your Open-Source Client Options In The Non-Mastodon Fediverse

May 8, 2024 by 22 Comments

When things started getting iffy over at Twitter, Mastodon rose as a popular alternative to the traditional microblogging platfrom. In contrast to the walled gardens of other social media channels, it uses an open protocol that runs on distributed servers that loosely join together, forming the “Fediverse”.

The beauty of the Fediverse isn’t just in its server structure, though. It’s also in the variety of clients available for accessing the network. Where Twitter is now super-strict about which apps can hook into the network, the Fediverse welcomes all comers to the platform! And although Mastodon is certainly the largest player, it’s absolutely not the only elephant in the room.

Today, we’ll look at a bunch of alternative clients for the platform, ranging from mobile apps to web clients. They offer unique features and interfaces that cater to different user preferences and needs. We’ll look at the most notable examples—each of which brings a different flavor to your Fediverse experience.

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