The Biological Motors That Power Our Bodies

October 14, 2024 by Maya Posch 50 Comments

Most of us will probably be able to recall at least vaguely that a molecule called ATP is essential for making our bodies move, but this molecule is only a small part of a much larger system. Although we usually aren’t aware of it, our bodies consist of a massive collection of biological motors and related structures, which enable our muscles to contract, nutrients and fluids to move around, and our cells to divide and prosper. Within the biochemical soup that makes up single- and multi-cellular lifeforms, it are these mechanisms that turn a gooey soup into something that can do much more than just gently slosh around in primordial puddles.

There are many similarities between a single-cell organism like a bacteria and eukaryotic multi-cellular organisms like us humans, but the transition to the latter requires significantly more complicated structures. An example for this are cilia, which together with motor proteins like myosin and kinesin form the foundations of our body’s basic functioning. Quite literally supporting all this is the cytoskeleton, which is a feature that our eukaryotic cells have in common with bacteria and archaea, except that eukaryotic cytoskeletons are significantly more complex.

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Hackaday Links: October 13, 2024

October 13, 2024 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

So far, food for astronauts hasn’t exactly been haute cuisine. Freeze-dried cereal cubes, squeezable tubes filled with what amounts to baby food, and meals reconstituted with water from a fuel cell don’t seem like meals to write home about. And from the sound of research into turning asteroids into astronaut food, things aren’t going to get better with space food anytime soon. The work comes from Western University in Canada and proposes that carbonaceous asteroids like the recently explored Bennu be converted into edible biomass by bacteria. The exact bugs go unmentioned, but when fed simulated asteroid bits are said to produce a material similar in texture and appearance to a “caramel milkshake.” Having grown hundreds of liters of bacterial cultures in the lab, we agree that liquid cultures spun down in a centrifuge look tasty, but if the smell is any indication, the taste probably won’t live up to expectations. Still, when a 500-meter-wide chunk of asteroid can produce enough nutritionally complete food to sustain between 600 and 17,000 astronauts for a year without having to ship it up the gravity well, concessions will likely be made. We expect that this won’t apply to the nascent space tourism industry, which for the foreseeable future will probably build its customer base on deep-pocketed thrill-seekers, a group that’s not known for its ability to compromise on creature comforts.

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Meet The Optical Data Format You’ve Never Heard Of Before

October 10, 2024 by Lewin Day 80 Comments

You consider yourself a power user. You’ve got lots of files, and damn it, you like to keep them backed up. Around a decade ago, you gave up on burning optical discs, and switched to storing your files on portable hard drives. One local, one off-site, and a cloud backup just to be sure. You’re diligent for a home gamer, and that gets you done.

The above paragraph could describe any number of Hackaday readers, but what of bigger operations? Universities, businesses, and research institutions all have data budgets far in excess of what the individual could even imagine. What might shock you is that some of them are relying on optical media—just not the kind you’ve ever heard of before. Enter Sony’s Optical Disc Archive.

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Lagrange Points And Why You Want To Get Stuck At Them

October 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 35 Comments

Visualization of the Sun-Earth Lagrange points.

Orbital mechanics is a fun subject, as it involves a lot of seemingly empty space that’s nevertheless full of very real forces, all of which must be taken into account lest one’s spacecraft ends up performing a sudden lithobraking maneuver into a planet or other significant collection of matter in said mostly empty space. The primary concern here is that of gravitational pull, and the way it affects one’s trajectory and velocity. With a single planet providing said gravitational pull this is quite straightforward to determine, but add in another body (like the Moon) and things get trickier. Add another big planetary body (or a star like our Sun), and you suddenly got yourself the restricted three-body problem, which has vexed mathematicians and others for centuries.

The three-body problem concerns the initial positions and velocities of three point masses. As they orbit each other and one tries to calculate their trajectories using Newton’s laws of motion and law of universal gravitation (or their later equivalents), the finding is that of a chaotic system, without a closed-form solution. In the context of orbital mechanics involving the Earth, Moon and Sun this is rather annoying, but in 1772 Joseph-Louis Lagrange found a family of solutions in which the three masses form an equilateral triangle at each instant. Together with earlier work by Leonhard Euler led to the discovery of what today are known as Lagrangian (or Lagrange) points.

Having a few spots in an N-body configuration where you can be reasonably certain that your spacecraft won’t suddenly bugger off into weird directions that necessitate position corrections using wasteful thruster activations is definitely a plus. This is why especially space-based observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope love to hang around in these spots.

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Hackaday Links: October 6, 2024

October 6, 2024 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

Remember that time a giant cylindrical aquarium in a Berlin hotel bar catastrophically failed and left thousands of fish homeless? We sure do, and further recall that at the time, we were very curious about the engineering details of how this structure failed so spectacularly. At the time, we were sure there’d be plenty of follow-up on that score, but life happened and we forgot all about the story. Luckily, a faithful reader named Craig didn’t, and he helpfully ran down a few follow-up articles that came out last year that are worth looking at.

The first is from prosecutors in Berlin with a report offering three possibilities: that the adhesive holding together the acrylic panels of the aquarium failed; that the base of the tank was dented during recent refurbishment; or that the aquarium was refilled too soon after the repairs, leading to the acrylic panels drying out. We’re a little confused by that last one just from an intuitive standpoint, but each of these possibilities seems hand-wavy enough that the report’s executive summary could have been “Meh, Scheiße happens.”

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Where Is The End Of DIY?

October 5, 2024 by Elliot Williams 72 Comments

Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on how lead and silver are refined and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al wondering at the complexity of the constructed world in which we live: If you think hard enough about anything around you right now, you’d probably be able to recreate about 0% of it again from first principles.

Smelting lead and building a cellphone are two sides of coin, in my mind. The process of getting lead out of galena is simple enough to comprehend, but it’s messy and dangerous in practice. Cellphones, on the other hand, are so monumentally complex that I’d wager that no single person could even describe all of the parts in sufficient detail to reproduce them. That’s why they’re made by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of experience with the tech – the only way to build a cellphone is to split the complicated task into many subsystems.

Smelting lead is a bad DIY project because it’s simple in principle, but prohibitive in practice. Building a cellphone from the ground up is incomprehensible in principle, but ironically entirely doable in practice if you’re willing to buy into some abstractions.

Indeed, last week we saw a nearly completely open-source build of a simple smartphone, and the secret to making it work is knowing the limits of DIY. The cell modem, for instance, is a black box. It’s an abstract device that you can feed data to and read data from, and it handles the radio parts of the phone that would take forever to design from scratch. But you don’t need to understand its inner workings to use it. Knowing where the limits of DIY are in your project, where you’re willing to accept the abstraction and move on, can be critical to getting it done.

Of course, in an ideal world, you’d want the cell modem to be like smelting lead – something that’s possible to understand in principle but just not worth DIYing in practice. And of course, there are some folks out there who hack on cell modem firmware and others who could do the radio engineering. But despite my strong DIY urges, I’d have to admit that the essential complexity of the module simply makes it worth treating as a black box. It’s very probably the practical limit of DIY.

HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along

October 4, 2024 by Jenny List 6 Comments

I’m sitting at a table writing this in the centre of a long and cavernous industrial building, the former print works of a local newspaper, I’m surrounded by hardware and software hackers working at their laptops, around me is a bustling crowd admiring a series of large projects on tables along the walls, and the ambient sound is one of the demoscene, chiptunes, 3D-printed guitars, and improbably hurdy-gurdy music. Laser light is playing on the walls, and even though it’s quite a journey from England to get here, I’m home. This is Hackfest Enschede, a two-day event in the Eastern Dutch city which by my estimation has managed the near-impossible feat of combining the flavour of both a hacker event and a maker faire all in one, causing the two distinct crowds to come together.

The Best Of Both Worlds, In One Place

To give an idea of what’s here it’s time for a virtual trip round the hall. I’ll start with the music, aside from the demosceners there’s Printstruments with a range of 3D-printedmusical instruments, and Nerdy Gurdy, as you may have guessed, that hacker hurdy-gurdy I mentioned. This is perhaps one of few places I could have seen a spontaneous jam session featuring a 3D-printed bass and a laser-cut hurdy-gurdy. Alongside them were the Eurorack synthesisers of Sound Force, providing analogue electronic sounds aplenty. Continue reading “HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along” →