Many people know about ultrasound because of its popularity in prenatal imaging - grainy, grey outlines of babies made using reflected sound waves. A new 'acoustic diode' could dramatically improve…

Active camouflage update. In a Harvard School of Engineering laboratory test, a team of applied physicists placed a device  with a new coating that intrinsically conceals its own temperature to…

Some of the more recent dramatic disasters in world-wide markets have occurred, not because people panicked or an election did not go someone's way, but because financial institutions have taken to…

Plasmas are a soup of charged particles in an electric field. While most commonly a part of lightning bolts and stars, the use of high voltage equipment has more practically meant very small plasmas…

It seems nowadays that makers (1) like to carry spare electronic parts around in a mint tin. Maybe I’m just Macgyver-old-school and prefer the challenge of getting along with just duct tape and a…

You can think of a capacitor somewhat like a rechargeable battery. It is able to store energy temporarily except that a rechargeable battery will last much, much longer than a capacitor. The simplest…

A tiny Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) accelerometer used in smart phones to adjust the orientation of the screen could serve to create a real-time urban seismic network and increase the…

An ordinary No. 2 pencil contains graphite (from the Greek γράφω, graphō which means "to write" or "to draw").  Graphite conducts electricity and you can use your pencil and a piece of…

In my previous article, we took a look at one of the signals generated by the 555 test circuit where the output pin (pin 3) is connected to ground (-) which is a simple series of very brief pulses.…

In previous articles, we've used the 555 test circuit as a hot liquid level indicator for the vision impaired and a cable tester as examples of some of the things that can be used as inputs to…