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 […]
engineering
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 […]
SONG: Octopus Gloves
SONG: “Octopus Gloves”. (OGG version) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News 13 July 2022, “This octopus-inspired glove helps humans grip slippery objects,” as used in the […]
Octopus gloves. They grab things better.
Science News reports on gloves that are especially good at picking slippery things up and sticking to ’em thanks to “rapidly switchable” materials inspired by […]