Today’s batteries are better.
Ars Technica busts a long-running myth about batteries – that they’re always five years away from any real improvement – with a look at how […]
electrical engineering
Science Art: Alternator by Ganz & Co, 1905
This is a Wechselstrommaschine, an alternator. The wheel goes around, and the spokes hit contacts – one set makes the electricity go in one direction […]
Science Art:Induction Coil Cutaway, 1920
Click to embiggen From Harry Winfield Secor’s The How and Why of Radio Apparatus, from the Experimenter Publishing Co., which you can read here. Electricity […]
Hot electric-car batteries recharge in 10 minutes.
Nature has research (from Joule) that brings us closer to an electric filling station for battery-powered cars, thanks to the discovery that raising the temperature […]
Anti-aging electrotherapy zaps earlobes to reset nerves.
Eurekalert has details on a new anti-aging system that, according to University of Leeds researchers, resets older folks’ autonomic nervous system by stimulating the vagus […]
Science Art: Coronal plasma on an ionization tube in operation, by BentaxGermany, 2013
Click to embiggen vastly If it looks like a miniature sun, maybe that’s because on one level it is – it’s creating plasma, which surrounds […]
Science Art: Electricity: condenser jars, an electro-static generator, and a vase with flowers, c. 1850.
Click to embiggen. A goache painting from the Wellcome Collection. A rather polite setting of research equipment with a bouquet. No idea whose, or what […]
Science Art: Tesla Coil: high-frequency discharge demonstrator, Welch Scientific Company, 1931
Click to embiggen Electrical history from PW Lanier and the Minneapolis Institute of Art: This tabletop Tesla coil was likely made for science classes, producing […]
Scanner helmet lets brain patients move around. (And look like warriors from Krull.)
The Guardian has a game-changing invention for neurologists and anyone who needs a brain-scan done – a wearable helmet that lets you walk around – […]
Electrical brain stimulation can boost your memory. For a day.
Science News has more on how a zap of electric current, placed just so, can increase your ability to make and maintain new memories: The […]
Science Art: Field Rheostats, 1907
Click to embiggen Not “field” as in “field recording,” but “field” as in “magnetic field.” These are from a chapter on direct-current dynamos in E. […]
Science Art: The Edison Multipolar Dynamo, 1894
Click to embiggen A big electric machine, as pictured in The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, […]
How to charge an electric car on the road.
Science Daily reports on a hurdle being cleared on the way to wirelessly charging a moving electric vehicle: If electric cars could recharge while driving […]
Chernobyl goes solar.
Popular Mechanics celebrates a plan to turn the nuclear disaster zone into a 1-gigawatt solar farm: The high levels of radiation make the zone unsuitable […]
Making batteries from seafood leftovers.
Hakai magazine explains how we can turn crab and lobster shells into batteries, plastics and (maybe) scaffolds for growing new organs: [Mark] MacLachlan [of the […]