Spin Your Own Passive Cooling Fibres

When the temperature climbs, it’s an eternal problem: how to stay cool. An exciting field of materials science lies in radiative cooling materials, things which reflect so much incoming heat …

Is It Time For Synthetic Diamonds To Shine?

The process of creating a diamond naturally takes between 1 and 3.3 billion years. Conversely, a lab-grown diamond can now be created in 150 minutes. But despite being an ethical and environmentall…

Colour Film Processing For The 2020s Hacker

We’re now somewhere over two decades since the mass adoption of digital photography made chemical film obsolete in a very short time, but the older technology remains in use by artists and en…

Desiccants, Tested Side By Side

We’re so used to seeing a little sachet of desiccant drop out of a package when we open it, that we seldom consider these essential substances. But anyone who spends a while around 3D printin…

Low-Cost Cryocooler Pumps Out Cheap DIY Liquid Nitrogen

A word of caution if you’re planning to try this cryocooler method for making liquid nitrogen: not only does it involve toxic and flammable gasses and pressures high enough to turn the works …

The Thermite Process Iron Foundry

The thermite process is a handy way to generate molten iron in the field. It’s the reaction between aluminium metal and iron oxide, which results in aluminium oxide and metallic iron. It&#821…

Watch SLS 3D Printed Parts Become Printed Circuits

[Ben Krasnow] of the Applied Science channel recently released a video demonstrating his process for getting copper-plated traces reliably embedded into sintered nylon powder (SLS) 3D printed parts…

Can You Freeze-Dry Strawberries Without A Machine?

Summer has settled upon the northern hemisphere, which means that it’s time for sweet, sweet strawberries to be cheap and plentiful. But would you believe they taste even better in freeze-dri…

Autochrome For The 2020s

For all intents and purposes, photography here in 2024 is digital. Of course chemical photography still exists, and there are a bunch of us who love it for what it is, but even as we hang up our la…

AI-Created Coffee Blend Isn’t Terrible

Weren’t we just talking about coffee-based sacrilege the other day? Here’s something to make the single-origin bean snobs chew their espresso cups: an artisan roastery in Helsinki is of…

DIY Bimetallic Strip Dings For Teatime

Do you like your cup of tea to be cooled down to exactly 54 C, have a love for machining, and possess more than a little bit of a mad inventor bent? If so, then you have a lot in common with [Chron…

Almost Making A Camera Sensor From Scratch

On our travels round the hardware world we’ve encountered more than one group pursuing the goal of making their own silicon integrated circuits, and indeed we’ve seen [Sam Zeloof] produ…

Wine In Beverage Cans Had A Rotten Egg Problem, Until Now

Aluminum beverage cans are used for all kinds of drinks, but when it comes to wine there are some glitches. Chief among them is the fact that canned wine occasionally smelled like rotten eggs. Than…

Implantable Battery Charges Itself

Battery technology is the major limiting factor for the large-scale adoption of electric vehicles and grid-level energy storage. Marginal improvements have been made for lithium cells in the past d…

Synthetic Spider Silk

While spider silk proteins are something you can make in your garage, making useful drag line fibers has proved a daunting challenge. Now, a team of scientists from Japan and Hong Kong are closer t…

Flux, From Scratch

Soldering flux is (or at least, should be) one of the ubiquitous features of any electronics bench. It serves the purpose of excluding oxygen from a solder joint as it solidifies, and in most cases…

Nanotechnology In Ancient Rome? There Is Evidence

Anything related to nanotechnology feels fairly modern, doesn’t it? Although Richard Feynman planted the seeds of the idea in 1959, the word itself didn’t really get formed until the 70…

This Unique Flip-Flop Uses Chemistry And Lasers

One of the first logic circuits most of us learn about is the humble flip-flop. They’re easy enough to build with just a couple of NOR or NAND gates, and even building one up from discrete co…

DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence

It’s one of the strangest unsolved cases, and even though the FBI closed their investigation back in 2016, this may be the year it cracks wide open. On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, who woul…

How To Refrigerate With Urine

It’s often said that the best science experiments are the ones which do not require any special devices or ingredients, which makes the use of what naturally comes out of one’s body cle…