Making a MXene in 30 Seconds Does Not Take 30 Seconds
Rice etched nine MAX families into MXenes in under 30 seconds. The raw data tell the more useful story: the reaction becomes almost instantaneous, while the full process keeps a second clock.
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IRZ archive, page 21.
AI is buying the books the web never saw, then cutting off their spines
Anthropic and Amazon have tied AI to a new physical pipeline: buy books the web never saw, scan them, and sometimes destroy the copies.
This electric aircraft flew for 27 minutes. It was not a range test
Heart X1 flew for 27 minutes with more than one megawatt of electric propulsion. The flight validates integration at regional-aircraft scale, not the 200 km range promised for the future ES-30.
Sigma BF: seven hours of machining to manufacture simplicity
The Sigma BF's solid body takes seven hours of machining and a robot-run factory line working around the clock. A look at the real industrial cost of minimalism, told by Sigma's own CEO.
Palestine Online: bringing the 1990s Palestinian web back to life
With Palestine Online, Processing Foundation fellow Amad Ansari rebuilds the Palestinian websites of the late 1990s. An archive where every technical choice is also a political one.
3D printing tungsten carbide: soften it, don't melt it
Hiroshima researchers deposited tungsten carbide-cobalt with a laser and hot wire, without fully melting it: over 1400 HV with no defects, and expensive material placed only where it matters.
How the narwhal builds the only straight tusk in nature
The narwhal's tusk grows in a spiral yet stays straight for over two meters. A new study reveals the mechanism: a molecular double helix with opposite chiralities that compensates for uneven deposition.
Waste heat isn't always waste: lessons from a quantum light engine
An atom in an optical cavity behaves like a heat engine. Basel physicists show that classifying outgoing photons as “waste heat” or useful energy changes the very consistency of the theory.
Printing gears that last: the pure PA11 bet
Prusa launched a carbon-fiber-free PA11 derived from castor oil. A counterintuitive call: for moving parts, the pure version beats the reinforced one on layer adhesion and friction.
Good designers, bad websites: the problem isn't talent, it's memory
An accessibility consultant proposes flipping a Nielsen heuristic back onto designers: recognize accessibility problems while designing, instead of trying to recall a thousand rules.