Dan Maloney

When all else fails, there’s radio. Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction through Appalachia stripped away every shred of modern infrastructure in some areas, leaving millions of residents with no ability to reach out to family members or call for assistance, […]

Pretty much every modern car has some driver assistance feature, such as lane departure and blind-spot warnings, or adaptive cruise control. They’re all pretty cool, and they all depend on the car knowing where it is in space relative to

Some inventions are so simple that it’s hard to improve them. The magnetic compass is a great example — a magnetized needle, a bit of cork, and a bowl of water are all you need to start navigating the globe.

We’ve all heard stories of the dangers of 3D printing, with fires from runaway hot ends or dodgy heated build plates being the main hazards. But what about the particulates? Can they actually cause health problems in the long run?

So far, food for astronauts hasn’t exactly been haute cuisine. Freeze-dried cereal cubes, squeezable tubes filled with what amounts to baby food, and meals reconstituted with water from a fuel cell don’t seem like meals to write home about. And

Chances are good that most of us will go through life without ever having to perform gas chromatography, and if we do have the occasion to do so, it’ll likely be on a professional basis using a somewhat expensive commercial

What color are the street lights in your town? While an unfortunate few still suffer under one of the awful colors offered by vapor discharge lamps, like the pink or orange of sodium or the greenish-white of mercury, most municipalities

If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly

Remember that time a giant cylindrical aquarium in a Berlin hotel bar catastrophically failed and left thousands of fish homeless? We sure do, and further recall that at the time, we were very curious about the engineering details of how

Bits of material levitating against gravity, a stream of water deflected by invisible means, sparks of light appearing out of thin air; with observations like those, it’s a wonder that the early experiments into the nature of electricity progressed beyond