Where Graph Theory Meets The Road: The Algorithms Behind Route Planning

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those d…

Mining And Refining: Tungsten

Our metallurgical history is a little bit like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, only without the paper; we’re always looking for something hard enough to cut whatever the current hardest meta…

How Does Time Work On The Moon?

We’re looking to go back to the Moon. Not just with robots this time, but with astronauts, too! They’ll be doing all kinds of interesting things when they get there. Maybe they’ll…

Why X86 Needs To Die

As I’m sure many of you know, x86 architecture has been around for quite some time. It has its roots in Intel’s early 8086 processor, the first in the family. Indeed, even the original …

The Greenhouse Effect Isn’t For Greenhouses

Think of a greenhouse. It’s a structure with glass walls that lets light in and traps heat, all for the benefit of the plants inside. As for how it works, that’s elementary! It’s …

The F Number On A Lens Means Something? Who Knew!

The Raspberry Pi has provided experimenters with many channels of enquiry, and for me perhaps the furthest into uncharted waters it has led me has come through its camera interface. At a superficia…

The Short Workbench

Imagine an electronics lab. If you grew up in the age of tubes, you might envision a room full of heavy large equipment. Even if you grew up in the latter part of the last century, your idea might …

Retro Gadgets: Pay TV In The 1960s

These days, paying for TV programming is a fact of life. You pay your cable company or some streaming service and the only question is do you want Apple TV and Hulu or would you rather switch one o…

Stacking Solar Cells Is A Neat Trick To Maximise Efficiency

Solar power is already cheap and effective, and it’s taking on a larger role in supplying energy needs all over the world. The thing about humanity, though, is that we always want more! Too m…

Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, Part 5, ch. 18 "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!" (1995) - Gould, Stephen Jay | WIST Quotations

Elitism is repulsive when based upon external and artificial limitations like race, gender, or social class. Repulsive and utterly false -- for that spark of genius is randomly distributed across all cruel barriers of our social prejudice. We...

Walking And Talking Through The UK National Museum Of Computing

I found myself in Milton Keynes, UK, a little while ago, with a few hours to spare. What could I do but rock over to the National Museum of Computing and make a nuisance of myself? I have visited m…

Big Chemistry: Hydrofluoric Acid

For all of the semiconductor industry’s legendary reputation for cleanliness, the actual processes that go into making chips use some of the nastiest stuff imaginable. Silicon oxide is nothin…

Ask Hackaday: What If You Did Have A Room Temperature Superconductor?

The news doesn’t go long without some kind of superconductor announcement these days. Unfortunately, these come in several categories: materials that require warmer temperatures than previous…

Car Driving Simulators For Students, Or: When Simulators Make Sense

There are many benefits to learning to fly an airplane, drive a racing car, or operate some complex piece of machinery. Ideally, you’d do so in a perfectly safe environment, even when the ins…

Measuring Trees Via Satellite Actually Takes A Great Deal Of Field Work

Figuring out what the Earth’s climate is going to do at any given point is a difficult task. To know how it will react to given events, you need to know what you’re working with. This r…

Slime Mold-Powered Smart Watches See Humans Fall In Love With The Goo

Humans are very good at anthropomorphising things. That is, giving them human characteristics, like ourselves. We do it with animals—see just about any cartoon—and we even do it with our own planet…

Electrical Steel: The Material At Heart Of The Grid

When thoughts turn to the modernization and decarbonization of our transportation infrastructure, one imagines it to be dominated by exotic materials. EV motors and wind turbine generators need mag…

Parts We Miss: The Mains Transformer

About two decades ago there was a quiet revolution in electronics which went unnoticed by many, but which overturned a hundred years of accepted practice. You’d have noticed it if you had a m…

Interview by Woodrow Wyatt, BBC TV (1959) - Russell, Bertrand | WIST Quotations

WYATT: Do you think that philosophy contribute to happiness? RUSSELL: Yes, if you happen to be interested in philosophy and good at it, but not otherwise – but so does bricklaying. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. Collected in...