Sealed Packs Of Pokémon Cards Give Up Their Secrets Without Opening Them

[Ahron Wayne] succeeded in something he’s been trying to accomplish for some time: figuring out what’s inside a sealed Pokémon card packet without opening it. There’s a catch, how…

Danger Is My Middle Name

Last week, [Al Williams] wrote up a his experience with a book that provided almost too much detailed information on how to build a DIY x-ray machine for his (then) young soul to bear. He almost ha…

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory Faces Shutdown In FY2025 Budget

The Chandra X-ray Observatory started its mission back in 1999 when Space Shuttle Columbia released it from its payload bay. Originally, it was supposed to serve only a five-year mission, but it ha…

Reviving A Sensorless X-Ray Cabinet With Analog Film

In the same way that a doctor often needs to take a non-destructive look inside a patient to diagnose a problem, those who seek to reverse engineer electronic systems can greatly benefit from the p…

X-Ray CT Scanners From EBay, Brought Back To Life

If you have ever wondered what goes into repairing and refurbishing an X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) scanner, then don’t miss [Ahron Wayne]’s comprehensive project page on doing exactl…

2000-Year Old Charred Manuscripts Reveal Their Secrets

Imagine trying to read a 2000-year old scroll from an ancient civilization. Now imagine that scroll is rolled up, and in a delicate, charred, carbonized form, having been engulfed by the fiery erup…

DIY Repair Brings An X-Ray Microscope Back Into Focus

Aside from idle curiosity, very few of us need to see inside chips and components to diagnose a circuit. But reverse engineering is another story; being able to see what lies beneath the inscrutabl…

Broken Genes And Scrambled Proteins: How Radiation Causes Biological Damage

If decades of cheesy sci-fi and pop culture have taught us anything, it’s that radiation is a universally bad thing that invariably causes the genetic mutations that gifted us with everything…

This Rembrandt Has Been Hiding a Surprising Secret For Centuries

At 3.63 meters (12 feet) tall and 4.37 meters across, the painting known commonly as The Night Watch is Rembrandt's largest painting.

This Scratch-Built X-Ray Tube Really Shines

On no planet is making your own X-ray tube a good idea. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk about it, because it’s pretty darn cool. And when we say making an X-ray tube…

Homemade CAT Scan Shouldn’t Scan Cats

[Pyrotechnical] thought about buying a CAT scanner and found out they cost millions of dollars. So he decided to build one for about $200 using a salvage X-ray tube and some other miscellaneous par…

CT Scans Help Reverse Engineer Mystery Module

The degree to which computed tomography has been a boon to medical science is hard to overstate. CT scans give doctors a look inside the body that gives far more information about the spatial relat…

Reverse Engineering An Apollo-Era Module With X-Ray

The gear that helped us walk on the Moon nearly 60 years ago is still giving up its mysteries today, with some equipment from the Apollo era taking a little bit more effort to reverse engineer than…