2026-02-09 17:00:31
As anyone who extrudes plastic noodles knows, the glass transition temperature of a material is a bit misleading; polymers gradually transition between a glass and a liquid across a range of temperatures, and calling any particular point in that range the glass transition temperature is a bit arbitrary. As a general rule, the shorter the glass transition range is, the weaker it is in the glassy state, and vice-versa. A surprising demonstration of this is provided by compleximers, a class of polymers recently discovered by researchers from Wageningen University, and the first organic polymers known to form strong ionic glasses (open-access article).
When a material transforms from a glass — a hard, non-ordered solid — to a liquid, it goes through various relaxation processes. Alpha relaxations are molecular rearrangements, and are the main relaxation process involved in melting. The progress of alpha relaxation can be described by the Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts equation, which can be exponential or non-exponential. The closer the formula for a given material is to being exponential, the more uniformly its molecules relax, which leads to a gradual glass transition and a strong glass. In this case, however, the ionic compleximers were highly non-exponential, but nevertheless had long transition ranges and formed strong glasses.
The compleximers themselves are based on acrylate and methacrylate backbones modified with ionic groups. To prevent water from infiltrating the structure and altering its properties, it was also modified with hydrophobic groups. The final glass was solvent-resistant and easy to process, with a glass transition range of more than 60 °C, but was still strong at room temperature. As the researchers demonstrated, it can be softened with a hot air gun and reshaped, after which it cools into a hard, non-malleable solid.
The authors note that these are the first known organic molecules to form strong glasses stabilized by ionic interactions, and it’s still not clear what uses there may be for such materials, though they hope that compleximers could be used to make more easily-repairable objects. The interesting glass-transition process of compleximers makes us wonder whether their material aging may be reversible.
2026-02-09 14:00:03
While the average person would use a standard charger to top off their phone, [Tom Stanton] is no average man. Instead, he put mind to matter with an entire pendulum battery system.
Using the inductive effects of magnets on copper coils, [Tom] found the ability to power small components. With that in mind, the only path was forward with a much larger pendulum. A simple diode rectifier and capacitors allow for a smoother voltage output. The scale of the device is still too small to power anything insane, even the phone charging test is difficult. One thing the device can do is juice up the electromagnetic launcher he put together a couple years back to hurl an RC plane into the air.
The useful applications of pendulum power storage might not be found in nationwide infrastructure, but the application on this scale is certainly a fun demonstration. [Tom] has a particular fascination with similar projects where practical application comes second to novelty. For a perfect example of this, check out his work with air powered planes!
2026-02-09 11:00:59
One of the constants in consumer electronics is that designers will try to put as many features into a single device as possible, whether it’s a Walkman with a radio tuner or a new class of devices that crams a photo and video camera in the same enclosure as a music player. At the time that the Kodak MC3 was released this made it a rather unique device, with it in hindsight being basically a smartphone without the phone, as [Tech Tangents] aptly notes in his recent video on the device.
Six years before Apple’s iPhone would be announced, and eight years before the first iPod with a video camera, the Kodak MC3 was in many respects bleeding edge technology targeted straight at tech enthusiasts. For less than $300 you got VGA-quality images, CompactFlash storage, and MP3 playback capability. The videos it produced were 320×240 resolution, h.263 encoded MOVs with a maximum length of 4 seconds at 20 FPS, or 4 minutes with a 64 MB CF card.
The unit that [Tech Tangents] got used came with a 128 MB CF card, but couldn’t use a 2 GB CF card, which is a shame. The screen on it got a lot of flak for not not having a backlight, but this was common for the era, as were the poor viewing angles. Ditto for the poor video quality, as anyone who invested in consumer digital cameras in the early 2000s can attest to. In that respect this Kodak device was probably a bit too ambitious with its features for the era, maybe to compensate for it completely missing the boat on the rise of digital camera technology around the time.
2026-02-09 08:00:57
We start this week with a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was shut down after 25 years of operation. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was one of only two heavy-ion colliders in existence.
So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the RHIC is going dark so that the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can take its place. Planned for activation in the mid-2030s, the EIC will occupy the same tunnel as the RHIC and reuse much of the same hardware. As the name implies, it will be used to collide electrons.
Switching gears (no pun intended) to the world of self-driving cars, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Dr. Mauricio Peña, made a surprising admission this week during a U.S. Senate hearing. When asked what his company’s vehicles do when they are presented with a situation that their on-board systems can’t resolve, Dr. Peña explained that they would contact a human “remote assistance operator.” He further clarified that these individuals, located both in the US and the Philippines, don’t literally drive the car remotely. Still, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts questioned not only the company’s transparency on the issue of remote assistance, but the idea that individuals overseas could be making decisions on how vehicles should operate on US roadways.
While on the subject of a hyped-up technology that hasn’t quite delivered, CNN posed an interesting question — in an article titled “No, but seriously: What’s going on with bitcoin?“, David Goldman pointed out that the cryptocurrency recently dropped below $63,000 USD for the first time in over a year and a half (as of today, it has rebounded slightly to just under $71,000). He goes on to explain that global uncertainty and rapidly improving AI technology are partly to blame, although we’re honestly not quite sure how that second one works. But more importantly, he theorizes that the market is returning to where it was before the 2024 presidential election. Then candidate Trump embraced the digital currency and promised to remove restrictions he claimed were holding it back. This naturally caused a bump in Bitcoin value after he won the White House, but as those changes have yet to materialize, the excitement is apparently wearing off.
In software news, the remaining Windows users who still haven’t been beaten into submission by Microsoft will have another feature taken away from them; as of February, the operating system’s integrated 3D Viewer is officially being deprecated. The tool allows users to inspect various types of 3D files, including STLs, and was added to Windows back when Microsoft was convinced “mixed reality” was going to be a thing. Anyone who has 3D Viewer installed will still be able to use it, but it will no longer be available for download officially from Microsoft. On the bright side, the web-based alternative that Microsoft recommends seems pretty slick.
Those holding out hope for life on the Red Planet will be excited to read the recent report from NASA which claims that the organic compounds discovered on Mars by the Curiosity rover can’t be fully explained by non-biological processes. In other words, while there are geological processes that could have produced some of the molecules detected, and some could have been deposited on the planet by meteorites, none of the possibilities studied could account for them all. The researchers caution that this doesn’t mean there is current or active life on the Martian surface, however, as we still don’t fully understand the timescales required to break these molecules down. Curiosity might have sniffed out the signs of life, but that life could still have died off billions of years ago.
On the subject of space, a recent post about the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit by mathematician John Cook got some debate going. He runs the numbers and argues that given the current number of LEO satellites (~12,500), and the area of space that they operate in, each bird has roughly 100,000,000 km³ to itself. Not exactly the close quarters flying that we’ve been hearing so much about recently with the proliferation of satellite constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink. That said, others were quick to point out that his math only really works out if all the satellites were evenly distributed, which is obviously not the case in the real world. So while his estimate is probably a bit too generous, it still helps put into context just how mind-bogglingly big space actually is.
Finally, for those who would prefer to scroll endlessly through something a bit more intellectually stimulating than social media, check out Xikipedia. This open source project takes the content from the Simple English Wikipedia and turns it into a never ending feed that you can browse, complete with an algorithm that will suggest articles to you based on your personal interests. What do you call the opposite of doomscrolling — maybe knowledgescrolling?
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’ve love to hear about it.
2026-02-09 05:00:58
The middle of the 20th century produced a revolution in understated stylish consumer design, some of which lives on today. The reality of living in a 1950s or ’60s house was probably to be surrounded by the usual mess of possessions from many past decades, but the promise was of a beautiful sleek and futuristic living space. Central to this in most homes would have been the TV set, and manufacturers followed the trends of the age with cases that are now iconic. Here in 2026 we put up with black rectangles, but fortunately there’s Cordova Woodworking with a modern take on a retro TV cabinet.
We’ve put the build video below, and it’s a wonderfully watchable piece of workshop titillation in a fully-equipped modern shop. While we appreciate they’ve put the design up for sale, we think many Hackaday readers could come up with their own having already been inspired. One thing we notice over the originals is that they use “proper” wood for their case, when we know the ’60s version would have had veneer-faced ply or chipboard.
The result is a piece of furniture which nicely contains the modern TV and accessories, but doesn’t weigh a ton or dominate the room in the way one of the originals would have, much less emit that evocative phenolic hot-electronics smell. We’d have one in our living room right now. Meanwhile if you’d like a wallow in mid-century TV, we have you covered.
2026-02-09 02:00:00
Computers are very good at doing exactly what they’re told. They’re still not very good at coming up with helpful suggestions of their own. They’re very much more about following instructions than using intuition; we still don’t have a digital version of Jeeves to aid our bumbling Wooster selves. [Sherrin] has developed something a little bit intelligent, though, in the form of a habit detector for use with Home Assistant.
In [Sherrin]’s smart home setup, there are lots of things that they wanted to fully automate, but they never got around to implementing proper automations in Home Assistant. Their wife also wanted to automate things without having to get into writing YAML directly. Thus, they implemented a sidecar which watches the actions taken in Home Assistant.
The resulting tool is named TaraHome. When it detects repetitive actions that happen with a certain regularity, it pops up and suggests automating the task. For example, if it detects lights always being dimmed when media is playing, or doors always being locked at night, it will ask if that task should be set to happen automatically and can whip up YAML to suit. The system is hosted on the local Home Assistant instance. It can be paired with an LLM to handle more complicated automations or specific requests, though this does require inviting cloud services into the equation.
We’ve featured lots of great Home Assistant hacks over the years, like this project that bridges 433 MHz gear to the smart home system. If you’ve found your own ways to make your DIY smart home more intelligent, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!
