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Why Did I Implant A Chip In My Hand?

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A few months ago, in the expo-hall of the Austin Convention Center, I laid my left hand flat on a sheet of sterile paper and let a very tall, friendly man insert an RFID chip into the space between my thumb and index finger. “Oh, you’ve got thick skin,” he said, pressing the needle a little harder. I made a half-hearted joke about being a woman on the internet, and the whole thing was over. Today, the tiny scab has healed, and the device sits just below the surface of my skin, where it looks like a little pill poking up out of my hand. Often, when I tell people I have an RFID chip, they react with confusion and a tiny drop of horror. “You have a what? Why?” Then they want to touch the little bead through my skin — if I squeeze my thumb and pinky together you can see the bulge and feel its hard exterior. What they’re touching is a passive, near-field communication (NFC) chip encased in glass. It’s likely that you’ve used a chip like this recently, if you’ve had to tap a fob to a...
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How To Build A Jacob’s Ladder

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This year is the 85th anniversary of quite possibly the greatest monster movie ever made: the original Frankenstein with Boris Karloff. The classic film gave us now-common horror tropes such as mad scientists in ill-fitting lab coats, angry mobs with torches, and of course, the transformational power of high-voltage electricity. Of the movie’s many amazing machines (real and imagined), the Jacob’s Ladder is perhaps the most iconic. It consists of two vertical wires, connected by a buzzing electrical arc that slowly travels upward. The science behind a Jacob’s Ladder is simple: When voltage is applied between conductors—in this case, the two wires—electrons on the positive side want to leap to the negative side. To do that, they have to over- come the insulating barrier of air between the wires. If you crank the voltage high enough, the electrons break free and turn the air into plasma. Since plasma is a great conductor of electricity, an arc appears between the wires. The heated ...
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The Only 7 Things You Need To Know About The Google Pixel

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Since the first Android phone, Google's offered up its smartphone operating system that rivals Apple's to phone manufacturers like LG, HTC, and Samsung while letting those companies handle the hardware. The Nexus line of devices were destined to serve as the titular Android experience but Samsung phones remained dominant in terms of popularity and outright sales. So Google not only made a de-facto Android phone, the company even put its name on it. So in 2016, we finally have a Google phone. Or more accurately, Pixel: Phone by Google. The Alphabet-owned company wants to position this device as the iPhone of Android phones--a premium-made device at a premium price. But if Google is taking on Apple and Samsung with the Pixel, how does it fare? It Looks Thick, Why So Big? In recent years, phone makers have placed a priority on thinness. Even though a bigger phone tends to lead to a bigger battery, handset manufacturers like Apple prioritize the depth of the device--even if...
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Why you should never ever feed bread to a duck

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Yes. True. And ducks don't disagree. But just like humans, waterfowl are often happy to chow down on food that's less than nutritious. “White bread in particular has no real nutritional value, so while birds may find it tasty, the danger is that they will fill up on it instead of other foods that could be more beneficial to them,” a spokeswoman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds told The Guardian in 2015. That year, a survey by the Canal and River Trust found that around 6 million loaves of bread were tossed to English and Welsh birds annually. Their latest data shows a drop to about 3.5 million loaves of bread per year, which isn't a terrible start. "Feeding birds is something that people have done for generations and we definitely don't want to discourage that," Richard Bennett, an environment manager at the Canal and River Trust, told the BBC at the time. "But we have to think about how we do it." How bad can it be? ...
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How to charge your devices the right way

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Charge and charge again. Rawpixel.com/Unsplash Without a battery, your expensive laptop or smartphone becomes a hunk of dead electronics. And these rechargeable powerhouses have a finite lifespan: Over time, they will start losing power faster and taking longer to charge. To extend the battery's useful life for as long as possible, you need to take care of your device properly. That means adopting good charging habits and taking care with battery storage. Here's what you need to know. The science of lithium-ion batteries The rechargeable batteries used by today's smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other devices all use a technology called lithium-ion. As you might expect, they contain...lithium ions. As Popular Science explained in our look at Tesla's Powerwall battey: When the battery is charging, positively-charged lithium ions move from one electrode, called the cathode, to the other, known as the anode, through an electrolyte solution in the battery ce...
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