Fighting Food Poisoning With A Patch

January 9, 2026 by Lewin Day 30 Comments

Food poisoning is never a fun experience. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll bite into something bad and realize soon enough to spit it out. Other times, you’ll only realize your mistake much later. Once the tainted food gets far enough into the digestive system, it’s too late. Your only option is to strap in for the ride as the body voids the toxins or pathogens by every means available, perhaps for several consecutive days.

Proper food storage and preparation are the key ways we avoid food poisoning today. However, a new development could give us a further tool in the fight—with scientists finding a way to actively hunt down and destroy angry little pathogens before they can spoil a good meal.

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Field Guide To North American Crop Irrigation

September 3, 2025 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

Human existence boils down to one brutal fact: however much food you have, it’s enough to last for the rest of your life. Finding your next meal has always been the central organizing fact of life, and whether that meal came from an unfortunate gazelle or the local supermarket is irrelevant. The clock starts ticking once you finish a meal, and if you can’t find the next one in time, you’ve got trouble.

Working around this problem is basically why humans invented agriculture. As tasty as they may be, gazelles don’t scale well to large populations, but it’s relatively easy to grow a lot of plants that are just as tasty and don’t try to run away when you go to cut them down. The problem is that growing a lot of plants requires a lot of water, often more than Mother Nature provides in the form of rain. And that’s where artificial irrigation comes into the picture.

We’ve been watering our crops with water diverted from rivers, lakes, and wells for almost as long as we’ve been doing agriculture, but it’s only within the last 100 years or so that we’ve reached a scale where massive pieces of infrastructure are needed to get the job done. Above-ground irrigation is a big business, both in terms of the investment farmers have to make in the equipment and the scale of the fields it turns from dry, dusty patches of dirt into verdant crops that feed the world. Here’s a look at the engineering behind some of the more prevalent methods of above-ground irrigation here in North America.

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Butta Melta Stops Rock-solid Butter From Tearing Your Toast

August 25, 2025 by Donald Papp 53 Comments

Ever ruin a perfectly serviceable piece of toast by trying (and failing) to spread a little pat of rock-solid butter? [John Dingley] doesn’t! Not since he created the Butta Melta to cozily snug a single butter serving right up against a warm beverage, softening it just enough to get nice and spreadable. Just insert one of those foil-wrapped pats of butter into the Melta, hang its chin on the edge of your mug, and you’ll have evenly softened butter in no time.

The Butta Melta is intentionally designed with a bit of personality, but also has features we think are worth highlighting. One is the way it’s clearly designed with 3D printing in mind, making it an easy print on just about any machine in no time at all. The second is the presence of the hinge point which really helps the Butta Melta conform to a variety of cup designs, holding the payload as close as possible to the heat regardless of cup shape. A couple of minutes next to a hot beverage is all it takes for the butter to soften enough to become easily spreadable.

You may remember [John] (aka [XenonJohn]) from his experimental self-balancing scooters, or from a documentary he made about domestic ventilator development during COVID. He taught himself video editing and production to make that, and couldn’t resist using those skills to turn a video demo of the Butta Melta into a mock home shopping style advertisement. Watch it below, embedded just under the page break, then print one and save yourself from the tyranny of torn toast.

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Food Irradiation Is Not As Bad As It Sounds

August 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 50 Comments

Radiation is a bad thing that we don’t want to be exposed to, or so the conventional wisdom goes. We’re most familiar with it in the context of industrial risks and the stories of nuclear disasters that threaten entire cities and contaminate local food chains. It’s certainly not something you’d want anywhere near your dinner, right?

You might then be surprised to find that a great deal of research has been conducted into the process of food irradiation. It’s actually intended to ensure food is safer for human consumption, and has become widely used around the world.

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A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain

July 17, 2025 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

So far in the “Field Guide” series, we’ve mainly looked at critical infrastructure systems that, while often blending into the scenery, are easily observable once you know where to look. From the substations, transmission lines, and local distribution systems that make up the electrical grid to cell towers and even weigh stations, most of what we’ve covered so far are mega-scale engineering projects that are critical to modern life, each of which you can get a good look at while you’re tooling down the road in a car.

This time around, though, we’re going to switch things up a bit and discuss a less-obvious but vitally important infrastructure system: the cold chain. While you might never have heard the term, you’ve certainly seen most of the major components at one time or another, and if you’ve ever enjoyed fresh fruit in the dead of winter or microwaved a frozen burrito for dinner, you’ve taken advantage of a globe-spanning system that makes sure environmentally sensitive products can be safely stored and transported.

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High Frequency Food: Better Cutting With Ultrasonics

March 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 36 Comments

You’re cutting yourself a single slice of cake. You grab a butter knife out of the drawer, hack off a moist wedge, and munch away to your mouth’s delight. The next day, you’re cutting forty slices of cake for the whole office. You grab a large chef’s knife, warm it with hot water, and cube out the sheet cake without causing too much trauma to the icing. Next week, you’re starting at your cousin’s bakery. You’re supposed to cut a few thousand slices of cake, week in, week out. You suspect your haggardly knifework won’t do.

In the home kitchen, any old knife will do the job when it comes to slicing cakes, pies, and pastries. When it comes to commercial kitchens, though, presentation is everything and perfection is the bare minimum. Thankfully, there’s a better grade of cutting tool out there—and it’s more high tech than you might think.

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Pizza Elevator Is The Most Vital Pandemic Technology Of All

July 28, 2023 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

Remember the darkest days of lockdown and the pandemic? We were trying to distance ourselves from strangers wherever possible. [scealux]’s pizza elevator was spawned at this time to make apartment pizza deliveries as contactless as possible, and it’s charmingly branded to boot.

The build was intended to loft a pizza from street level to a third-floor balcony (by the American convention, ground floor is numbered one). Built with CNC-cut wooden parts, the elevator frame snap-fits on to the balcony railing. From there, a single spool runs out wire to four corners of the elevator platform.

As the crank is turned, the platform lowers under its own weight. The pizza can then be placed on the platform, and dinner can be lifted back up to the apartment. It’s a simple design, and one that manages to lift the pizza in a stable and flat fashion. With that said, we’d still like to see some anti-tip railings on a potential revision two.

Mock the branding all you will, it’s actually a smart design choice. The recognizable logo made the device’s purpose super obvious to the pizza delivery person, easing the introduction of the technology to a new user base.

If you want to make your own pizza instead of ordering out, you can automate that too.

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