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Hackaday Links: April 20, 2025

We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of the detection of biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using the Kepler space telescope because it lies in the habitable zone around its red-dwarf star. Initial observations with Hubble indicated the presence of water vapor, and follow-up investigations using the James Webb Space Telescope detected all sorts of goodies in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. But more recently, JWST saw signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), organic molecules which, on Earth, are strongly associated with biological processes in marine bacteria and phytoplankton.

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Put A Little Pigeon In Your Next Clock Project

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably wondered why gear teeth are shaped the way they’re shaped. But we’ll go out on a limb and say you’ve never wondered why gear teeth aren’t shaped like pigeons, and what a clock that’s not quite a clock based around them would look like.

If this sounds like it has [Uri Tuchman] written all over it, give yourself a cookie. [Uri] has a thing for pigeons, and they make an appearance in nearly all his whimsical builds, from his ink-dipping machine to his intricately engraved metal mouse. For this build, pigeons are transformed into the teeth of a large, ornate wheel, cut from brass using an impressive Friedrich Deckel pantograph engraver. To put the pigeon wheel to work, [Uri] built an escapement and a somewhat crooked pendulum, plus a drive weight and dial. It’s almost a clock, but not quite, since it doesn’t measure time in any familiar units, and the dial has a leg rather than hands — classic [Uri].

It may not be [Clickspring]-level stuff, but it’s still a lovely piece of work, and instructive to boot. The way [Uri] figured out the profile for the meshing teeth by looking at the negative space swept out by the pigeon profiles was pretty sweet. Plus, pigeons.

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