In ecology, there used to be a concept — now largely unfashionable — that species could be described as r- or K-selected, depending on how they treat their offspring. An …read more
Modern airliners are rather complicated feats of engineering. Innumerable safety-critical components are connected with tens of miles of wiring, complex digital buses, and dozens (perhaps hundreds) of computers. But, as …read more
In this age of neural net “AI”, even the most skeptical of Butlerians have to agree that these machine learning models can be very, very good at pattern recognition if …read more
Sometimes claimed to give you wings, energy drinks can, at the very least, be used to make rockets fly. This is what [Nate Scovill] did in a recent video, where …read more
Steam power is a staple of the steampunk aesthetic, thermodynamics, and a checkpoint for the budding mechanical engineer studying heat cycles. But because food is largely made of water, steam …read more
It’s a sci-fi trope that you can ‘scan for life signs’ and detect if there are humans — or suspiciously human-shaped aliens — present, but in real life it’s harder …read more
[The Modern Rogue] found an old childhood friend in a closet: a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic kit. Along with [Josh Nass], he put it through its paces and made a …read more
A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you …read more
Do you remember back when electronics came in clear cases? Back around the turn of the millennium, when translucency was chic. [3DSage] sure does, which is why he went to …read more
If there’s an engineer’s equivalent to those YouTube ASMR videos, then perhaps it comes in a good repair or servicing journey filmed without edits at the bench. Relaxing to watch, …read more
Remember Animusic? They were these incredible animated music videos with original tunes being played by computer-generated robots. Well, the MegCell Pulse might be the coolest robots-playing-music thing we’ve seen since …read more
After the Nintendo 3DS handheld console saw most its online services including the online store (eShop) taken offline not too long ago, it was only a matter of time before …read more
Doing anything on a frozen lake can carries some amount of risk. Nevertheless, every year events ranging from car racing to ice skating are held on them. As such, proper …read more
Any parent with a baby and deep pockets– or friends with deep pockets– will probably sing the praises of the BabyBjorn rocking sling chair. A simple spring-loaded sling seat allows …read more
These days, most of us interface with our computing devices in the same old-fashioned ways—via keyboards, mice, and touchscreens. The idea of a more direct brain-to-machine interface remains appealing to …read more
It’s still hot on both sides of the Atlantic, but Kristina has a new secret weapon for staying cool without making noise. Will Elliot and the others follow suit? Time …read more
[Stephen] had an interesting piece of hardware at home—namely, a Flume water monitor. It’s a smart device which reports usage data to Flume’s servers, and the water utility in turn. …read more
After a multi-year hiatus, the venerable BugTraq mailing list is back! For decades, BugTraq was the place where vulnerabilities were disclosed, from the early days when nearly all vendors viewed …read more
In the more innocent days of the World Wide Web you could simply put a robots.txt file in the root of your website that search engine indexing bots and similar …read more
If you ask a random person who [John Mauchly] or [J. Presper Eckert] were, you’d probably get a blank stare. Ask a Hackaday reader, and you have a better shot. …read more