Using rocket science to make “carbon-negative” energy.
Heatmap reports on some SpaceX alums — that is, former employees of the space corporation — who gave up on astronauting in favor of making […]
engineering
Science Art: Hooks, Swivels, &c.
Need a lift? These are hooks designed for lifting … well, whatever you need picked up. I found them in (deep breath): The engineer’s sketch-book […]
Science Art: The Furnaces of the World…., 1912
This is a Popular Mechanics illustration from 102 years ago that sounds like it could have been written today. Warnings about industrial pollution increasing air […]
Science Art: Detaching Roll Mechanism, 1912.
This is a device from Cotton Card-Room Machinery, a catalog published by Whitlin Machine Works. I can’t say much about how it works because I’ve […]
Science Art: MeerKAT telescopes, 2018
They do look a little like meerkats, these big African satellite dishes. This is a photo from the Square Kilometre Array Organisation (SKAO) / South […]
Science Art: Check Valve, 1882.
A valve to prevent backflow… so the river doesn’t wind up in the reservoir, or the effluent in the shower pipes. From A practical treatise […]
Hacking the train.
Ars Technica recently reported on a new front in the “right to repair” war. A group of hackers broke into a Polish train system in […]
Science Art: Mouchot’s solar thermal collector from 1860, from Nordisk Familjebok, 1917.
This is a solar-powered generator. A funnel with sides angled at 90 degrees is pointed at the sun to catch its radiation, and those rays […]
Dry canal costs billions.
Forbes covers a climate-change story about global trade and supply chains (something the pandemic taught the world about), focused on that thin isthmus between the […]
Cicadas are so loud, they cause fiberoptic-cable interference.
Wired reveals a very strange insect-monitoring device called DAS, or “distributed acoustic sensing,” normally used to track vibrations made by seismic shifts and volcanic eruptions. […]
Science Art: Altitude and azimuth instrument, 1876.
How high? This device will tell you. It’s from The great Centennial exhibition critically described and illustrated, by Phillip T. Sandhurst, which you can read […]
Cooking with gas increases cancer risk.
I hate to read it, but NPR reported on a Stanford study that found gas stoves increase levels of benzene in the home – a […]
Science Art: Causerie sur la Peche Fluviale en Chine, 1909.
Do two sampans make a catamaran? Looks like they did for this Chinese fisherman at the dawn of the last century, angling on the river […]
Science Art: The Engineer’s Sketch-Book, 1508 & 1509.
Two machines, or parts of machines. These are a “Four-Plunger Valve” and “A starter valve” from The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appliances, contrivances […]
Saving the beach with some stick-and-palm-frond engineering.
Reuters reports from Senegal on a new anti-erosion project that uses dirt-cheap, pollution-free materials to defend an island from Atlantic swells that threaten to wash […]