Man builds fire-spouting propane pipe organ
Pipe organs generate their sound thanks to fluid dynamics, but the “fluid” that makes the music is up to whomever builds the instrument. A traditional organ usually blows air through…
August 2026
Large genome models used to design new viruses
A lot of the AI work in biology has been focused on designing proteins. That’s partly because proteins do most of the business of life, catalyzing the interesting chemistry and…
Hard-to-recycle PVC turned into sustainable lubricant
Polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, is most frequently found in pipes, credit cards, plastic bottles, electrical cable insulation, and other everyday items. PVC demand is high, too, with around…
Parasitic zombie-ant fungus thrives in mosses, too
The parasitic fungi in the Cordyceps genus are a favorite subject of nature documentaries. They’ve also infiltrated popular culture via the zombie-apocalypse video game The Last of Us (2013) and…
Infrared glasses could push the boundaries of human eyesight
A team of engineers created new, Blade Runner-esque eyewear that gives wearers a glimpse into the hidden world of infrared light. Though it’s literally all around us, humans can’t naturally…
Thousands of servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controllers
Thousands of Internet-connected servers sold by the world’s biggest manufacturers can be remotely backdoored by exploiting critical vulnerabilities—some more than a decade old—that lurk deep inside system motherboards, according to…
This Atlantic hurricane season is looking like a dud, but there will be a price to pay
The city of Houston, where I live, has been ground zero for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. So far this year there have been two named storms, Arthur and Bertha,…
D-Wave shows off its new entry in quantum computing race
D-Wave is a bit of an oddity in the quantum computing space, having been founded back in the last century. And its initial offering wasn’t a quantum computer like those…
Plasma waves spotted on sun’s surface for the first time
With the power of the world’s largest solar telescope, astronomers have successfully glimpsed the sun’s roiling surface in never-before-seen detail. In some of these new images, the cresting vortices that…
During WWII, England poisoned sheep with anthrax on an idyllic Scottish island
Any tourists driving the remote coasts of Wester Ross in the northwest Scottish Highlands would be forgiven for overlooking Gruinard Island. After all, this low, featureless hump has nothing on…