Aqueous Battery Solves Lithium’s Problems

The demand for grid storage ramps up as more renewable energy sources comes online, but existing technology might not be up to the challenge. Lithium is the most popular option for battery storage …

DIY Chemistry Points The Way To Open Source Blood Glucose Testing

Every diabetic knows that one of the major burdens of the disease is managing supplies. From insulin to alcohol wipes, diabetes is a resource-intensive disease, and running out of anything has the …

Promethean Matches: The Ancestor To Modern Matches

The history of making fire at will is a long and storied one, stretching back to the days when we’d rub wooden sticks together, or use flint and steel to ignite tinder. An easier, albeit vast…

Homebrew Gel Fuel Keeps The Steam Coming, Legally

All it takes is one knucklehead to go and do something stupid to screw things up for everyone. We’re not exactly sure who the knucklehead is behind the recent ban on hexamine fuel tablets, bu…

A Transistor, But For Heat Instead Of Electrons

Researchers at UCLA recently developed what they are calling a thermal transistor: a solid-state device able to control the flow of heat with an electric field. This opens the door to controlling t…

The Slow March Of Sodium-Ion Batteries To Compete With Lithium-Ion

The process of creating new battery chemistries that work better than existing types is a slow and arduous one. Not only does it know more failures than successes, it’s rare that a once succe…

Radioactive Water Was Once A (Horrifying) Health Fad

Take a little time to watch the history of Radithor, a presentation by [Adam Blumenberg] into a quack medicine that was exactly what it said on the label: distilled water containing around 2 microg…

William Blake Was Etching Copper In 1790

You may know William Blake as a poet, or even as #38 in the BBC’s 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. But did you know that Blake was also an artist and print maker who made illuminated (f…

Making Magnetic Tape From Scratch

The use of magnetic tape and other removable magnetic media is now on the wane, leading to scarcity in some cases where manufacture has ceased. Is it possible to produce new magnetic tape if you do…

Custom Fume Hood For Safe Electroless Plating

There are plenty of chemical processes that happen commonly around the house that, if we’re really following safety protocols to the letter, should be done in a fume hood. Most of us will hav…

Spuds Lend A Hand In The Darkroom

If film photography’s your thing, the chances are you may have developed a roll or two yourself, and if you’ve read around on the subject it’s likely you’ll have read about …

Rock Salt May Lead The Way To Better Batteries

The regular refrain here when it comes to announcements of new battery chemistries hailed as potentially miraculous is that if we had a pound, dollar, or Euro for each one we’ve heard, by now…

Testing Oxide Etchants For The Home Semiconductor Fab

Building circuits on a silicon chip is a bit like a game of Tetris — you have to lay down layer after layer of different materials while lining up holes in the existing layers with blocks of …

Electrostatic Generator Project Starts With Molten Sulfur

Although the basic concept of electrostatic attraction has been known since ancient times, it was only in the 17th century that scientists began to systematically investigate electrostatics. One of…

Homebrew Probe Tip Etcher Makes Amazingly Sharp Needles

There’s a simple reason why high-tech gadgets like PCs, TVs and smartphones are so cheap: they’re mass-produced. By spreading out huge engineering costs over equally huge production vol…

Zinc-Air, The Next Contender In Vehicle Batteries?

If you’ve got an interest in technology, it’s inevitable that your feed will feature a constant supply of stories with titles in the vein of “New battery breakthrough offers unlim…

Growing Oxides On Silicon On The Road To DIY Semiconductors

Doing anything that requires measurements in nanometers is pretty difficult, and seems like it would require some pretty sophisticated equipment. But when the task at hand is growing oxide layers o…

Copper Be Gone: The Chemistry Behind PCB Etching

For a lot of reasons, home etching of PCBs is somewhat of a dying art. The main reason is the rise of quick-turn PCB fabrication services, of course; when you can send your Gerbers off and receive …

Supremely-tough Glass Performs Under Pressure

There’s some nifty research from the University of Bayreuth, together with partners in China and the U.S., on creating supremely tough aluminosilicate glass that boasts an unusual structure. …

Different Etching Strokes For Different PCBs, Folks

[Sebastian] probably didn’t think he was wading into controversial waters when he posted on his experimental method for etching PCBs (in German). It’s not like etching with hydrochloric…