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The Channel Crossing Bridge That Never Was

October 27, 2025 by 17 Comments
Full marks for clarity of message. Credit: Euro Route materials

When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history might have taken a very different turn. Among the competing proposals for a fixed Channel crossing was a massive bridge. It was a scheme so audacious that fate would never allow it to come to fruition.

Forget the double handling involved in putting cars on trains and doing everything by rail. Instead, the aptly-named Euro Route proposed that motorists simply drive across the Channel, perhaps stopping for duty-free shopping in the middle of the sea along the way.

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Built-In Batteries: A Daft Idea With An Uncertain Future

October 23, 2025 by 60 Comments

Having a gadget’s battery nestled snugly within the bowels of a device has certain advantages. It finally solves the ‘no batteries included’ problem, and there is no more juggling of AA or AAA cells, nor their respective chargers. Instead each device is paired to that one battery that is happily charged using a standardized USB connector, and suddenly everything is well in the world.

Everything, except for the devices that cannot be used while charging, wireless devices that are suddenly dragging along a wire while charging and which may have charging ports in irrational locations, as well as devices that would work quite well if it wasn’t for that snugly embedded battery that’s now dead, dying, or on fire.

Marrying devices with batteries in this manner effectively means tallying up all the disadvantages of the battery chemistries and their chargers, adding them to the device’s feature list, and limiting their effective lifespan in the process. It also prevents the rapid swapping with fresh batteries, which is why everyone is now lugging chunky powerbanks around instead of spare batteries, and hogging outlets with USB chargers. And the task of finding a replacement for non-standardized pouch cell batteries can prove to be hard or impossible.

Looking at the ‘convenience’ argument from this way makes one wonder whether it is all just marketing that we’re being sold. Especially in light of the looming 2027 EU regulation on internal batteries that is likely to wipe out the existence of built-in batteries with an orbital legal strike. Are we about to say ‘good riddance’ to a terrible idea?

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What Happened To Running What You Wanted On Your Own Machine?

October 22, 2025 by 136 Comments

When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.

Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.

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Ore Formation: Return Of The Revenge Of The Fluids

October 21, 2025 by 16 Comments

In the last edition of our ongoing series on how planets get ore– those wonderful rocks rich in industrial minerals worth mining– we started talking about hydrothermal fluid deposits. Hydrothermal fluid is the very hot, very salty, very corrosive water that sweats out of magma as it cools underground and under pressure.

We learned that if the fluid stays in the magma chamber and encourages the growth of large crystals there, we call that a pegmatite deposit. If it escapes following cracks in the surface rock, it creates the characteristic veins of an orogenic deposit. What if the fluid gets out of the magma chamber, but doesn’t find any cracks?

Perhaps the surrounding rock is slightly permeable to water, and the hydrothermal fluid can force its way through, eating away at the base rock and remineralizing it with new metals as it goes. That can happen! We call it a porphyry deposit, particularly in igneous rock. It’s not exactly surprising that a hydrothermal fluid would find igneous rock: the fluid is volcanic in origin, after all, just like igneous rock. (That’s the definition of igneous: a rock of volcanic origin.) Igneous rocks, like granite, tend not to be terribly reactive so the fluid can diffuse through relatively unchanged.

Igneous rocks aren’t the only option, though. If the hydrothermal fluid hits carbonates, well, I did mention it’s acidic, right? Acid and carbonates are not friends, so all sorts of chemistry happens, such that geologists give the resulting metamorphic formation a special name: skarn. Though similar in origin, skarns are often considered a different type of deposit, so we’ll talk about the simpler case, diffusion through non-reactive rocks, before getting back to the rocks that sound like an 80s fantasy villain. (Beware Lord Skarn!)

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A Tale Of Two Car Design Philosophies

October 16, 2025 by 123 Comments

As a classic car enthusiast, my passion revolves around cars with a Made in West Germany stamp somewhere on them, partially because that phrase generally implied a reputation for mechanical honesty and engineering sanity. Air-cooled Volkswagens are my favorites, and in fact I wrote about these, and my own ’72 Super Beetle, almost a decade ago. The platform is incredibly versatile and hackable, not to mention inexpensive and repairable thanks to its design as a practical, affordable car originally meant for German families in the post-war era and which eventually spread worldwide. My other soft-spot is a car that might seem almost diametrically opposed to early VWs in its design philosophy: the Mercedes 300D. While it was a luxury vehicle, expensive and overbuilt in comparison to classic Volkswagens, the engineers’ design choices ultimately earned it a reputation as one of the most reliable cars ever made.

As much as I appreciate these classics, though, there’s almost nothing that could compel me to purchase a modern vehicle from either of these brands. The core reason is that both have essentially abandoned the design philosophies that made them famous in the first place. And while it’s no longer possible to buy anything stamped Made in West Germany for obvious reasons, even a modern car with a VIN starting with a W doesn’t carry that same weight anymore. It more likely marks a vehicle destined for a lease term rather than one meant to be repaired and driven for decades, like my Beetle or my 300D.

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Rubik’s WOWCube: What Really Makes A Toy?

October 15, 2025 by 24 Comments

If there ever was a toy that enjoys universal appeal and recognition, the humble Rubik’s Cube definitely is on the list. Invented in 1974 by sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik with originally the name of Magic Cube, it features a three-by-three grid of colored surfaces and an internal mechanism which allows for each of these individual sections of each cube face to be moved to any other face. This makes the goal of returning each face to its original single color into a challenge, one which has both intrigued and vexed many generations over the decades. Maybe you’ve seen one?

Although there have been some variations of the basic 3×3 grid cube design over the years, none have been as controversial as the recently introduced WOWCube. Not only does this feature a measly 2×2 grid on each face, each part of the grid is also a display that is intended to be used alongside an internal processor and motion sensors for digital games. After spending many years in development, the Rubik’s WOWCube recently went up for sale at $299, raising many questions about what market it’s really targeting.

Is the WOWCube a ‘real’ Rubik’s Cube, and what makes something into a memorable toy and what into a mere novelty gadget that is forgotten by the next year like a plague of fidget spinners?

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The Great Northeast Blackout Of 1965

October 14, 2025 by 31 Comments

At 5:20 PM on November 9, 1965, the Tuesday rush hour was in full bloom outside the studios of WABC in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The drive-time DJ was Big Dan Ingram, who had just dropped the needle on Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” To Dan’s trained ear, something was off about the sound, like the turntable speed was off — sometimes running at the usual speed, sometimes running slow. But being a pro, he carried on with his show, injecting practiced patter between ad reads and Top 40 songs, cracking a few jokes about the sound quality along the way.

Within a few minutes, with the studio cart machines now suffering a similar fate and the lights in the studio flickering, it became obvious that something was wrong. Big Dan and the rest of New York City were about to learn that they were on the tail end of a cascading wave of power outages that started minutes before at Niagara Falls before sweeping south and east. The warbling turntable and cartridge machines were just a leading indicator of what was to come, their synchronous motors keeping time with the ever-widening gyrations in power line frequency as grid operators scattered across six states and one Canadian province fought to keep the lights on.

They would fail, of course, with the result being 30 million people over 80,000 square miles (207,000 km2) plunged into darkness. The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 was underway, and when it wrapped up a mere thirteen hours later, it left plenty of lessons about how to engineer a safe and reliable grid, lessons that still echo through the power engineering community 60 years later.

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