transparent wood

NileRed attempts to make transparent wood, inspired by an AvE video, by removing lignin and infiltrating the wood with resin. It is a long, detailed walkthrough of the chemistry and the practical difficulties.

Pop Culture Detective examines how the US military works with Hollywood, using the Independence Day sequel's Army recruitment tie-in as the starting point. It looks at the joint marketing between 20th Century Fox and the military.

A short clip of the McMurtry Speirling fan car setting a new Goodwood Hill record of 39.08 seconds at the 2022 Festival of Speed, driven by Max Chilton. It beat the previous timed shootout record set in 1999 and the outright record held by the VW ID.R.

A short unscientific fire test comparing a massive timber house with an ordinary house. It shows the wood chars and burns slowly while still holding together.

Who Killed Captain Alex is Uganda's first action movie, made for under $200 by Nabwana IGG in Wakaliga. This version has English subtitles and a video joker (VJ Emmie) providing running commentary.

Coverage of the McMurtry Speirling fan car breaking the Goodwood hillclimb record with a 39.08 second run driven by Max Chilton. It beat the Volkswagen ID.R and the 1999 McLaren time.

A satirical CBC Radio This Is That sketch profiling a Vancouver artisanal firewood company that sells bundles of kindling for $1000.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

Builders Matt Risinger and Jordan Smith visit a Swiss cross-laminated timber factory that makes thick all-wood walls with no traditional insulation and wooden nails instead of glue or chemicals. The video is sponsored by Siga.

Louis Rossmann interviews Kaylie Milliken and Mellissa Wood, producers of the documentary Billion Dollar Bully, about Yelp's alleged practices toward businesses.

Matthias Wandel shows how his pantorouter, a template router machine, works. The flexible machine cuts joints such as mortise and tenon and dovetails, and plans are available.

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

The first part of a long series documenting Dave Bull's Tokyo woodblock workshop as it produces a reproduction of Hokusai's The Great Wave. It follows the carving, proofing and printing of the reward print for Kickstarter backers.

Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.

A short clip of a Renault F1 engine playing God Save the Queen by precisely controlling its RPM, recorded at Goodwood. It demonstrates how finely the drivetrain can be controlled.

A woodworker shows how his table saw accident happened, why it happened and how to avoid a similar one. He describes severe hand lacerations from a blade contact.

A two-minute explanation of what a rocket mass heater is, starting from how a conventional wood stove works and why creosote and chimney fires occur. It shows how burning hot and storing the heat in thermal mass makes for an efficient heater.

An episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on five-over-one buildings, wood-frame floors atop concrete bases, with engineering background and some oil industry news. It is long, rambling and has NSFW language.

Craig Heffner's Black Hat 2013 talk on exploiting network surveillance cameras, covering how insecure their firmware is. It shows how easily such devices can be compromised.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

A short clip from the 1995 film Hackers in which the characters attempt to hack the Gibson supercomputer, shown with flashy stylized visuals of digital intrusion.

A short clip from Woody Allen's 1973 film Sleeper in which a man who wakes up in the future is told that health foods are unhealthy and tobacco is good for you.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

A short CSI clip in which characters try to track a killer's IP address by writing a Visual Basic GUI. It is a famous example of absurd TV hacking.

Matt Damon appears on Hot Ones, eating progressively spicier wings while discussing his film career and promoting Stillwater. He also explains how the decline of the DVD market changed which movies get made.

R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.

Veritasium tells the story of how Shuji Nakamura and others made the blue LED, long thought nearly impossible. It covers the materials challenge of gallium nitride and the persistence it took.

Tech Ingredients shows how to make a homemade radiative cooling paint, with a custom liquid panel that cools below ambient temperature outdoors. The video covers the materials and how to apply the paint.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make ultra-white radiative paint that cools surfaces below ambient temperature without electricity. He walks through the research papers and the household-materials process.

A 105-minute film of a West African smith family in Burkina Faso smelting iron from ore, from making charcoal and building the kiln to forging tools. It is a cultural recreation filmed for the camera, not current practice.

Smarter Every Day films Prince Rupert's drops, tempered glass drops, in high-speed slow motion at 130,000 fps. It shows how the drop's heavy internal stress lets the head survive hits while the tail shatters the whole thing.

Veritasium explains how Penrose tilings and quasicrystals overturned the belief that 5-fold symmetry and non-periodic crystals were impossible, including an interview with Paul Steinhardt.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

Huygens Optics experiments with etching tiny patterns in glass, covering hydrofluoric acid risks, buffered oxide etch, photoresist and chromium masks, and laser-induced etching. It ends with attempts at microscopic Tesla valves.

Practical Engineering compares modern concrete with that of the Roman Empire, covering modern techniques like roller compacted concrete and water-reducing admixtures. It explains the tradeoffs of Roman construction versus reinforced concrete.

Veritasium explains how jet engines run hotter than their components' melting points, using cooling air and single-crystal superalloy turbine blades. It covers how the blades are grown as aligned crystals.

Practical Engineering gives a short introduction to concrete, covering the difference between concrete and cement, the ingredients, and reinforcement. It includes a hydraulic press demonstration of compressive strength.