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.
Archive
All stories · page 8
IRZ archive, page 8.
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.
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.
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.
The concert that didn't crackle
Nightly German orchestra broadcasts sounded far too clean to be records. That one detail led an American engineer to the Magnetophon, the machine that made audio editing invisible, then normal, then universal.
The Blueprints for a Civilization Fit on an SD Card
Open Source Ecology squeezed its entire machine wiki into a file readable without a network. Seven years later, that 2019 copy is still the newest one anyone can download.
A leak ten billion times weaker, predicted before the first rivet
On an airliner or a destroyer, the energy leaking from one antenna to another gets computed before the first weld. On the menu: a cubic cost, a ghost cavity that makes the model lie, and a story starting in 1981.
A domino clock with no moving parts
In 2010, Carbon Design Group flipped black and white dots with a custom-built coil actuator. The tabletop version swaps movement for light: what the reduction removes, what it keeps, and what it finally makes buildable.
The first digital hospital started by removing paper journeys
MIS-I did more than put medical records on a screen. It replaced paper journeys between departments with a shared system for orders, results and clinical documentation.
Your Wi-Fi router can now tell when someone crosses the room
Xfinity WiFi Motion turns already-installed gateways into motion detectors without cameras. The sensor arrives through software, and a new category of presence data arrives with it.