Swans on Tea

100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious Scholars

Popular Science Puts Entire Scanned Archive Online, Free
You can’t go directly to an issue to browse, but once you have arrived somewhere by search, there are no restrictions on scrolling around. You’ll also find a properly hyperlinked table of contents in each magazine.
Search the PopSci archives

Solder is a nice woody word, even though it contains tin. And for even more irony (and silvery), there is a new solder that contains iron and silver, and eliminates lead.
Magnetic solders are a leap towards green alternatives
By subjecting the solder to an alternating magnetic field, the solder can be selectively heated. This keeps [...]

Lock picking with advanced foil impressioning
All you need to do now is put some turning pressure on the key and make small ‘up and down’ movements. The pins that are not in the correct position will bind and become stuck in the lock. These pins will push the tape in a little when the key [...]

Record grooves under an electron microscope
It has CD pips, too, for those of you too young to remember what a “record” is.
But if you put a needle in the groove and moved them relative to each other, the needle would wiggle back and forth. Use a transducer to convert it to an [...]

TED 2010: Death Star Laser Gun Zaps Mosqitoes Dead
Myhrvold demonstrated a “Death Star” laser gun designed to track and kill mosquitoes in flight. The device was crafted from parts purchased on eBay by scientists at Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures Laboratory.
Video here: High Speed Videography of Mosquitoes
The third video is the best one, showing the critters being [...]

Meat stylus for the iPhone
It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger.

Be there in a jiffy
There are five three formal/scientific/technical definitions of “jiffy.” How long it takes to make popcorn is not one of them.

Endeavour night launch
And a video
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I remember seeing the first night launch from Orlando. But these are from a slightly closer vantage point.

Feb. 9, 1870: Feds Get on Top of the Weather
It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to east, or southwest to northeast. But other than looking upwind, that knowledge was little help in predicting the weather until you could move weather reports downwind faster than the weather [...]

Busted more than once.
Skulls in the Stars: Mythbusters were scooped — by 130 years! (Archimedes death ray)
About the same time, however, and in an earlier volume of the Proceedings, I found an article with the title, “On the burning mirrors of Archimedes, and on the Concentration of light produced by reflectors,” by John Scott. [...]

Physics Buzz: Chicken Head Tracking
The technique – which you could generally call “tracking” but is also pretty much the same thing as “dead reckoning” (or is it ded reckoning?) – is utilized by aircraft and some car navigation systems. (I love it when “high tech” turns up in Nature.) The chicken’s body communicates its [...]