I spent my morning wrestling with 1,200 fragments of grey ABS plastic while the sun attempted a weak appearance through the February clouds. My two decades of monitoring the plastic-injection-molding industry and its various impacts on the credit card statements of the nation provide me with the necessary cynicism to judge these bricks because someone […]

I think the era of government-only outposts in orbit just ended. Starlab Space LLC finished its Commercial Critical Design Review with NASA this past Monday. Blueprints are now becoming metal. But the shift from computer models to the assembly line is where the manufacturing begins. I’m partial to the idea that we are seeing the […]

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The sound is a screech. I would argue that most office workers recognize the piercing wail of transparent tape as it leaves the roll. To put it bluntly, we have ignored the mechanics of this noise for decades while focusing on grander mysteries of the universe. But a team of physicists at the University of […]

Building a high-tech medical device on the ground is like trying to build a house of cards on a bouncy castle. Gravity pulls at every molecule and ruins the symmetry. I noticed that LambdaVision decided to leave the ground behind to fix this problem. They booked their spot on the Starlab commercial space station. This […]

Today, physicists at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona demonstrated a method to manipulate the internal architecture of a single particle of light. They call these structured photons. It seems to me that this discovery changes the basic alphabet of quantum mechanics. Scientists controlled the shape and […]

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel issued its 2025 findings during the final weeks of the previous year. I noticed the analysis focuses less on the mechanics of the engines and more on the institutional health of the organization. The long and short of it is that the United States is trying to manage a new […]

Why does the architect of our digital future still find herself sitting alone in a lecture hall designed for hundreds? I noticed a dispatch yesterday from The Stanford Daily regarding the growth of Rewriting The Code on campus. The reality for many is a seat in a computer science lecture where one woman represents the […]