The UK has powered up an unusual fusion reactor.
Science magazine takes us inside the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade, an experimental fusion reactor which has been switched on after a 7-year build […]
engineering
Science Art: Close-up view of a rock cutter in the Everglades Drainage District, c. 1920
Click to embiggen This is a machine for cutting through rock in a swamp. Or really, in a very broad, very shallow river – which […]
Science Art: Dynamometer, 3 Feb 1865
Click to embiggen A dynamometer, illustrated by (or for) the United States Sanitary Commission in 1865. A dynamometer measures power output. For an engine, it […]
Science Art: Mechanische Maschinen und Automaten 49, from Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum …, 1420-1430
This is something I first assumed was a very early typewriter or printing press, from the Bavarian State Library’s copy of Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum […]
Science Art: H.G. Dorsey: Device for Graphically Reproducing Sound Waves, 1912
Click to embiggen slightly A device from the early 20th century to turn sound waves into drawings – creating some of the first waveform illustrations. […]
Science Art: Photograph taken from a high-speed video camera during a record-setting firing of an electromagnetic railgun (EMRG)…, 2008.
Click to embiggen No gunpowder was harmed in the making of this photograph. That’s just the power of a lot of magnetism making a hunk […]
Science Art: Water-Cooling of the Converter, 1891
Click to embiggen From Wedding’s Basic Bessemer Process, by W. B. Phillips and E. Prochaska, which you can preview here. I found it on the […]
Science Art: Quasi-Poloidal Stellarator (QPS), 2007
Click to embiggen This is a fusion reactor that was never built, a small power plant that takes the principles of a tokamak (use super-heated […]
Science Art: Hero’s Steam Turbine, 1903
A machine that converts heat into motion – an amazing feat – from the book New Conceptions in Science by Carl Snyder, found in the […]
Science Art: Biosphere_2_-_panoramio_(4) by Qygen, 19 Aug 2003.
Click to embiggen Sure, I listen to an episode of Omnibus! here and there, and the latest was on the oddly half-forgotten project that was […]
Science Art: Verge Watch Escapement, from The Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary, Vol. 2, 1820.
A horological device called a “verge escapement” (on the bottom) with a balance wheel (on the top) from a pocketwatch. An “escapement” is the thing […]
Denmark to build energy-producing islands (that you can live on).
Inhabitat talks up a pretty cool design project that’s taking shape off Copenhagen, where the government has announced plans to build Holmene, a complex of […]
MIT shrinks objects to the nano-scale.
MIT researchers have devised a technique to create a solid, 3D structure and then reduce it to one-thousandth its original volume: “It’s a way of […]
Science Art: Storage and Launching of A.4. Rocket Projectile, 1940s.
Click to embiggen This is how Allied intelligence pictured German V2 rockets being used during World War II. A decade and a half later, this […]
Meat by law, not by lab.
Not the usual science-mag fare, but yesterday USA Today had a story that’s sort of about business and sort of about unintended consequences of cutting-edge […]