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IRZ archive, page 4.

Wood-and-thread relief by Nosheen Iqbal: stepped geometric fields stitched in muted colors with three-dimensional flowers standing off the panel

She embroiders on wood, where every mistake is permanent

A former lead watch designer, Nosheen Iqbal pulls thread and beads through laser-cut birch, turning Islamic geometry and Pakistani textile traditions into reliefs that forgive no wrong stitch.

Two Petri dishes where yellow bacterial colonies are printed into circuit-like patterns on a dark blue background

Twenty-four bacterial colonies to add two bits

MIT prints bacterial colonies the way engineers place electronic components: two transistors, three relays. The computation gets reprogrammed by changing the print pattern, without touching the DNA.

Close-up photo of a Kermit the Frog puppet, the mascot that gave the protocol its name in 1981

A protocol born in 1981 just squashed a 34-year-old bug

Fifteen years after the last stable release, C-Kermit 11 ships with more than 1,700 automated tests, IPv6 and a fix for a bug introduced in 1992. A look at forty-five years of a file-transfer protocol.

Color bar test card showing ZX Spectrum colors on a VGA monitor connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico

The monitor forgot what black looked like

Dissecting the RP2040 scanvideo library, Kevin went from seventeen VGA pins down to six, enough for the ZX Spectrum palette. And one missing black pixel was enough to dim the whole screen.

The SPOKE controller, a round circuit board with 27 drilled copper pads and lit NeoPixels

Twenty-seven copper pads, no touch chip

SPOKE turns 27 copper pads punched into a circuit board into a MIDI controller. The interesting part: the RP2040 has no touch hardware at all, so detection is a discharge time counted in software.

Two 3D-printed tactile skin prototypes, one flat and one U-shaped, with labeled layers: PETG base, conductive TPU, conductive fabric patches and soft cover

Robot touch fits in sixteen electrodes

A 3D-printed tactile skin locates a press to within a few millimeters with sixteen electrodes and not a single discrete sensor. A close reading of the process: recipe, results, blind spots.

Blood draw performed with an evacuated tube during a military medical screening

Your blood draw still runs on a 1949 patent

A factory-calibrated vacuum acts as pump, meter and seal at once: a teardown of the closed system behind most routine blood draws, built on a patent filed in 1947.

View of Shahar Livne's The Devil's Milk collection: dark furniture with organic surfaces mixing wood and rubber

The Devil's Milk Still Flows Into Your Tires

A latex scale, a rubberwood cabinet, a bench wearing synthetic skin: with The Devil's Milk, Shahar Livne turns three centuries of rubber's industrial history into furniture you can touch.

Illustration of the improvised radio telescope: an inverted pyramidal horn sitting on a metal enclosure, connected by cable to a laptop

The galaxy's missing mass, measured in a backyard

A horn made of roof flashing, a filtered $45 amplifier, an SDR dongle: a former IEEE Spectrum editor says he detected dark matter from his backyard. Here is what he actually measured, and where the proof stops.