In his latest “cutaway” video, Steve Mould takes a look at how you can nest siphons to create a system that periodically flushes itself. This kind of water-powered timer is Keep reading
Tag: engineering
Saving Screens with Shear-Thinning Fluids
These days glass screens travel with us everywhere, and they can take some big hits on the way. Manufacturers have made tougher glass, but they continue to look for ways Keep reading
Liquid Metal Printing
Engineers have developed a new 3D-printing technique that uses molten aluminum to quickly manufacture large-scale parts. This Liquid Metal Printing method deposits the metal into a bed of tiny glass Keep reading
Capturing the Tides
Twice a day the tides rise and fall along coastlines. Increasingly, engineers are trying to harness these regular currents for clean energy. Tidal turbines spin during the fastest flows, turning Keep reading
Mitigating Urban Floods
For densely-populated urban areas, floods are one of the most damaging and expensive natural disasters. We can’t control the amount of rain that falls, so engineers need other ways to Keep reading
Fixing Reverse Osmosis
Desalination and water treatment plants both rely on reverse osmosis to generate clean water for human use. The standard theory behind reverse osmosis for the last half century suggested that Keep reading
Sandgrouse Soak in Water
Desert-dwelling sandgrouse resemble pigeons or doves, but they have a very different superpower: males can soak in and hold 25 milliliters of water in their feathers, which they carry tens Keep reading
Acoustic Cameras
Acoustic cameras use arrays of microphones to isolate where sounds are coming from. As Steve Mould shows in this video, they have some incredibly cool properties. They can show engineers Keep reading
How Spillway Gates Work
Dams and reservoirs need a way to control their water level, and for many, that’s managed using spillway gates. In this video, Grady from Practical Engineering introduces several types of Keep reading
Testing Full-Size Engines
Engineers can often use small-scale models to test the physics of their creations, but sometimes there’s no substitute for going large. In this photo, we see a full-size commercial engine Keep reading