2026-04-07 02:30:21
Everything on the electromagnetic spectrum has some properties of both waves and particles, but it’s difficult to imagine a radio wave, for example, behaving like a particle. The main evidence for a particle-like nature is quantization, the bundling of electromagnetic energy into discrete packets. One way around this is to theorize that quantization is due to the specific interaction between the electromagnetic field and matter, not intrinsic to the field itself. To investigate this theory, [Huygens Optics] conducted several experiments with gamma rays, including Compton scattering.
For these experiments, he used a Radiacode 110 X-ray and gamma ray detector, which uses a photodetector to detect radiation’s passage through a scintillation crystal. By summing the energy contained in the light emitted by one ray, it can measure the ray’s energy and, over time, create an energy spectrum. [Huygens Optics] used the americium capsule from an old smoke detector as a radiation source, and cast a lead enclosure to shield the Radiacode from most background radiation, with a small opening for measurements.
First, he tested whether the inverse-square law held true for gamma radiation by measuring radiation at varying distances from the source, which it did. The second experiment was more complicated and measured the temporal correlation between ray detections. For this, he used a second-order correlation function to correlate observations from two Radiacodes. Since there was no included software for time detections, he opened the devices and found a test pad which produced a pulse when a detection was made, then used an Arduino to time these. There was no correlation between rays emitted by the americium source, but interestingly, there was a strong correlation in background radiation due to cosmic ray-induced radiation showers.
For a final experiment, [Huygens Optics] demonstrated Compton scattering, the scattering caused by a ray knocking outer electrons away from atoms. The energy of the emitted radiation depends on the angle of incidence. As the angle between the radiation source and a block of graphite increased, the radiation observed behind the graphite shifted to lower energies, as expected.
None of these experiments was absolutely conclusive, but the Compton scattering in particular was strong evidence that quantization is innate to the electromagnetic field. If you’re interested in more, we’ve covered similar questions before.
2026-04-07 01:00:45
The news is full of reports from the moon-bound Integrity, otherwise known as Artemis II. Mostly, the news is good, but there has been one “Houston, we have a problem…” moment. The space toilet, otherwise known as the Universal Waste Management System or UWMS is making a burning smell while in use. While we would love to be astronauts, we really don’t want to go ten days without using the can, and it made us wonder how, exactly, the astronauts answered the call of nature.
Back in the Apollo-era, going to the bathroom was a messy business. The capsule wasn’t that big, and there were no women on board. So you simply strapped an adhesive-rimmed bag or tube to yourself and answered nature’s call with your two closest coworkers right there.
The system was far from perfect. Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 both had to do some housekeeping due to leaky bags.
Astronaut Ken Mattingly reportedly said, “Man, one of the feats of my existence the other day was, in 42 minutes, I strapped on a bag, went out of both ends, and ate lunch…. I used to want to be the first man to Mars. This has convinced me that, if we got to go on Apollo, I ain’t interested.”
Still, it was better than the first Mercury launch, where Alan Shepard famously relieved himself in his spacesuit while sitting on the pad for over eight hours. Later missions used hoses.
Things got slightly better with Skylab, where there was more room. The Shuttle also had a toilet. You got a curtain for privacy, but you couldn’t go #1 and #2 at the same time. Also, apparently, the contraptions were not easily workable for females.
The early International Space Station used a similar system to the shuttle. However, in 2020, the UWMS debuted. It is easier to use for the female anatomy, and it has a door. This is essentially the same bathroom crammed into Integrity. Given the size of the capsule, we doubt the door is more than a symbol, but still.
Rather than explain the UWMS operation, you can watch the video below. Note that everyone has their own funnel. There are some things you just don’t want to share.
We don’t know what the burning smell is on Integrity, but we are sure we are going to find out. One other thing we never quite see addressed is how you clean up afterward. We aren’t sure we want to know.
Perhaps it is ironic that the first Artemis mission with a crew is having bathroom problems. After all, the Artemis slogan is “Let’s Go!” You’ll have to finish that joke on your own.
Back in 2016, NASA solicited ideas about space toilets. If you have any ideas, maybe drop them a line.
2026-04-06 23:30:44
The topic of micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) has become increasingly prevalent over the past years, as amidst dismissal and panic, researchers attempt to distinguish just how much of a problem MNPs truly are. The most essential problem here is that we are still developing the tools to accurately measure the levels of MNP contamination. Recently, [Madeline E. Clough] et al. demonstrated in an article published in Analytical Methods how gloves worn in laboratory settings can create false positive MNP signals.
As we covered previously, detecting MNPs is tough due to the detection methods used, many of which rely on interpreting signals from methods like pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS), with protocols for this and other methods still being worked on, particularly on how to filter out false positives.
The article by [Clough] demonstrates how dry contact of lab gloves on samples can deposit stearate salts – left over from their production, which are subsequently misidentified as being MNPs, specifically polyethylene (PE). These false positives occur with µ-Fourier transform infrared (µ-FTIR) spectroscopy and µ-Raman spectroscopy, but can occur with Py-GC-MS as well, as has been determined previously. Substances like the fatty lipids that are commonly found in the human body, and in particular the brain, will closely match the PE signature.
With these very common stearate salts now also a likely source of contamination with MNP measurements, it just becomes more obvious that it’s incredibly hard to make accurate assessments about any hazards of MNPs until we can determine their presence with any level of reliability.
2026-04-06 22:00:21
These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.
We can look back and laugh at low capacity USB Flash drives of the early 2000s, yet the first storage drive to hit 1 TB capacity did so in 2007, with a Hitachi Deskstar 7k100, only for that level of capacity in PCs to not really be exceeded nineteen years later.
We also had Blu-ray discs (BD) promise to cram the equivalent of dozens of DVDs onto a single BD, with two- and even four-layer BDs storing up to a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight GB. Yet today optical media is dying a slow death as the sole remaining cheap storage option. NAND Flash storage has only increased in price, and the options for those of us who have large cold storage requirements would seem to be decreasing every day.
So what is the economical solution here? Invest in LTO tapes using commercial left-overs, or give up and sign up for Cloud Storage
for the low-low price of a monthly recurring fee?
Although there are many people today who use just a lightweight laptop with something like 256 GB of storage in it without any complaints, the problem would seem to lie mostly with those who are really into having local and offline data. This can include things like multimedia content, but also project files and resources, which especially in the case of video editing and game development can quickly balloon into pretty serious size requirements.
Over the decades of memory storage, there’s been a near-constant flurry of new innovations and technologies, always with the knowledge that in a decade there would be massively larger forms of storage or at least big price drops to look forward to. This is how my first late 90s PC didn’t have just a zippy Celeron 400 CPU, but also a massive 4 GB HDD.
Compared to the 30 MB HDD in the 386-based system that I had before this was massive, but with multimedia content flooding in courtesy of the filesharing revolution, I quickly had to pop in a 10 GB HDD. By the time that I upgraded to a new PC that was considered small, and I found myself well above 20 GB, before soon joining the 1 TB and later the 5+ TB club. By 2012 HDDs were using 2 TB platters, so this was basically becoming unavoidable.
Meanwhile a lot of files were offloaded or backed up onto optical media, both CDs and DVDs. Although ZIP disks also briefly made an appearance in my PCs, optical discs were simply far cheaper and more universally usable.
Even before the current ‘AI’ datacenter-induced tripling of Flash storage costs that’s also affecting USB Flash drives and HDDs, optical media had been slowly phased out for a while. Even without checking sales numbers, you don’t have to be a genius to consider it a bad sign that manufacturers like Pioneer are exiting the optical storage market and big names like Sony ceased the production of recordable Blu-ray discs along with MiniDisc and MiniDV formats.
If you have recently shopped around for internal 5.25″ optical disc drives (ODDs) in particular, you may have noticed that these are becoming increasingly more rare and expensive. Even stand-alone BD player options are becoming more limited, with that distinct ‘final gasp’ vibe that comes with a dying format, as with VHS and kin in the past.
Part of the problem can probably be attributed to the move away by content distributors – including multimedia, games and software – from physical media to online distribution methods. This takes the form of streaming services, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and online game stores. At this point you do not even need a BD player in your home game console, never mind PC, to install games. Neither do you need a BD player connected to your smart TV as you can just join the new brave world of terminal-based subscriptions.
So with demand for optical media massively reduced by this shift, what’s left for those of us who just want to back up our data in peace and without shelling out too much hard-earned cash?
With the prospect of cheap DVD and BD blanks becoming a thing of the past, or unusable due to a lack of new optical drives to use them with, what options remain? We can look at metrics like cost per GB to see what might conceivably make sense.
The most recent 50-disc spindle of DVD+Rs that I purchased came in at just under €15 for 235 GB, so that’s about 6 cents/GB, and I could have gotten it much cheaper by going for larger spindles and shopping around some. For comparison, SSD storage was more than triple that even before the recent price surge, and HDDs are coming in around that same price tag as well.
A quick look at LTO tapes and drives for sale shows that while tapes for the older LTO-8 standard from 2017 are pretty reasonable, the drives cost an absolute fortune, so you’d have to be pretty lucky to score one without having to pawn off a kidney.
Add to this that LTO tapes are only really guaranteed for a lifespan of 15-30 years and are incomparably slower due to being a linear format. This makes tape storage only really suitable for the coldest of cold storage, and not for keeping some videos around, or for game development resources that you would like to pop in and quickly query without dying from old age while a tape seeks to the appropriate position.
Even assuming that the current insane surge in pricing for RAM, NAND Flash, and even HDD storage is just a temporary blip, and that by the time 2027 rolls around the RAMpocalypse will just be a bad dream to meme about, the basic economics of cost per storage would still not have changed in any measurable way.
The advantage of optical media, especially DVDs, is that they’re a very simple technology, relatively speaking. While there is some impressive technology in the optical pick-up component of an ODD, over the decades they have become highly affordable commodity devices. Meanwhile the discs are very cheap to produce, being at their core just some plastic with a coating on which the bits are written, while being very durable if kept away from physical harm.
It’s also essentially guaranteed that a DVD+R or BD-R will not have its data altered, something which cannot be guaranteed with a USB Flash drive. Filesystem corruption and electrical issues may damage or even destroy the Flash drive.
Although it’s easy to say that one should just ‘stop hoarding data’ or subscribe to some cloud storage solution for potentially infinite money per GB, high latency and the possibility of data loss due to a datacenter issue, there are many arguments to be made in favor of keeping local, offline copies, and that this should be done on highly durable media. We just cannot be sure that optical media will remain an option in the future.
What is your take on this conundrum? How do you manage your storage needs in this modern era, and what are your plans for the future? Please feel free to sound off in the comments.
2026-04-06 19:00:09
It’s always nice to simulate a project before soldering a board together. Tools like QUCS run locally and work quite well for analog circuits, but can fall short with programmable logic. Tools like Wokwi handle the programmable side quite well but may have license issues or require the cloud. The Velxio project by [David Montero Crespo] is quite an excellent example of an (online) circuit simulator with programmable logic and local execution!
It’s built largely around Wowki’s AVR8JS library for Arduino simulation. All CPU simulation occurs on the local computer, while sketch compilation happens on the backend using official Arduino tools. But this was certainly not the most impressive aspect of the project. Likewise, Velxio features RP2040 execution using the rp2040js library. It also features the execution of some ESP32 derivative boards built around the RISC-V architecture using the RiscVCore.ts library.
For more complex CPU architectures like the vanilla ESP32, Velexio implements a QEMU simulation on the backend. This methodology even enables the execution of Raspberry Pi Python code. Multiple boards can also be used in the same simulation, allowing one to test interactions between Raspberry Pis and other boards! It can also expand to handle multi-file code executions and it keeps everything in a backend database. Of course, everything is wrapped together in a neat modern UI, with a circuit diagram, parts selector, and full-blown IDE. You can try it at velxio.dev. Or, you could execute it on your home lab; it’s just one docker compose away!
If you enjoy embedded simulations, make sure to check out this ember simulation on an RP2040. Not to mention other Arduino/browser simulators we’ve seen in the past.
2026-04-06 16:00:49
When the inevitable Kessler Syndrome cascade sweeps Starlink and its competitors from Low Earth Orbit in what will doubtless be a spectacular meteor shower of debris, the people behind Sceye and its competitors are going to be laughing to the bank. That’s because they’re putting their connectivity rather lower than orbit — in the stratosphere, with high-altitude dirigibles.
The advantages are pretty obvious: for one, the dirigible isn’t disposable in the way the very-low-orbit satellites Starlink and its planned imitators use. For another, the time-of-flight for a signal to get to a dirigible 20 km up is less than a tenth of the time it takes to get 480 km up — and that affects latency. Thirdly, the High Altitude Platform System (HAPS) concept won’t require any special transmitters. Regular cellular modems using ordinary 4G and 5G bands and speeds are usable, which eliminates a big barrier to rollout.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, and even dated, perhaps that’s because it is — Google tried to beam internet down from the stratosphere with its Loon project, before shutting it down in 2021. One of Loon’s major shortcomings was reliance on the shifting winds of the upper atmosphere, something the new generation of dirigible stations won’t have to worry about.
Of course, until the positive feedback loop of satellite collisions creating debris that begets yet more collisions that we call a Kessler Syndrome — which we’ve written about in arcade form, oddly enough–one could also use these HAPS stations as a bridge between space-based and ground-based networks.
