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It’s finally happened: after nearly a century, Mickey Mouse has slipped off Disney’s copyright leash. The first versions of the iconic cartoon character, seen in Steamboat Willie and a silent version of Plane Crazy, enter the public domain in the US on January 1st, 2024. (An early version of Minnie Mouse is also fortunately included.) There’s still a…
The approach is linked to a political philosophy which champions the idea of pioneering entrepreneurs as figureheads who advance civilisation through sheer individual brilliance and determination. In reality, however, most modern technological building blocks – like car batteries, space rockets, the internet, smart phones, and GPS – emerged from publicly funded research. They were not the inspired work of corporate masters of the universe.…
Aptly named the Adaptable THruster based on Electrospray powered by Nanotechnology, or ATHENA, the compact unit relies on micro and nanotechnology to produce a silicon wafer featuring seven emitter arrays, fitted with a combined total of more than 500 of the tiny emitters that fire a spray of ions that are accelerated by an electrostatic field…
My children are hopelessly addicted to their gaming devices. This is a problem, but not one that I can directly solve because the school mandates that they have both an Android smartphone and a Windows laptop. Rather than to meet the problem head on I figured the better way to address it is to replace consumption with…
Representing a huge win for Ecuador’s Indigenous groups, this year the country held a referendum on extractivism, the first of its kind worldwide. On August 20, citizens headed to the polling stations to choose whether to halt oil exploitation in the Yasuní National Park in the Amazon and prohibit mining in the Chocó Andino region in…
Driven by the hackerspace movement and the broader community, we, Libre Space Foundation, are actively building our own satellites, space technologies, sharing knowledge and resources, and pushing the boundaries of space exploration. Our mission is to democratize space, making it available to everyone, regardless of background or resources. This emerging movement faces unique challenges, including…
This a project close to my heart… For our final project, we built Computron, a parallel computer consisting of Raspberry Pi Picos that communicate over a I2C bus. To demonstrate the power of parallel computation among these devices, the Mandelbrot set is computed across Picos. Every Pico computes a portion of the set, while one…
Remember the Chinese spy balloon—aka the “civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes” (according to China)—that in February flew over the United States until the US Air Force shot it down? Apparently the super-secret surveillance device was, um, using an American internet service provider to communicate with its operators in China
If you’re wondering why perovskite solar cells are not yet widely available 14 years after that first paper was published, that’s a good question. Silicon is a more expensive energy-capturing material, but its durability has made it the go-to photovoltaic material of choice. Perovskites are relatively inexpensive, but they are unstable. Their crystalline structure shifts…
Meanwhile, electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the…
Dave5 