Abdulmatinlittle

It may look like an alien desk tidy, but you're actually looking at a bicycle frame hot off the 3D printer.

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When [brokengun] decided to build a 7 ft diameter wind turbine, he had no idea how to even start, so he did as most of us would do and read some books on the topic. His design criteria was that it would be simple to construct and use as many recycled parts as possible. This wind turbine charges a 12 volt battery which can then be used to power a variety of gadgets.

Although made from recycled components, this isn’t a thrown together wind turbine. A lot of thought went into the design and build. [brokengun] discusses matching the blade size to that of the generator in order to maximize power and efficiency.  The design also incorporates a feature that will turn the turbine perpendicular to the wind if the wind-speed gets to high. Doing this prevents the turbine from being damaged by strong gusts.

For the main support/hub assembly, a Volvo 340 strut was used because they are widely available, cheap and known for being long-lasting. The tail boom is made from electrical conduit and it’s length is determined by the size of the main fan rotor. The tail vane is made from steel sheet metal and its surface area is also dependent on the fan rotor size to ensure that the turbine functions properly. The blades are made from wood but instead of making them himself, [brokengun] felt these were worth ponying up some cash. [brokengun] also scored a 30 ft high lattice tower an airport was getting rid of. This worked out great as it’s just the right height for a turbine of this size.

If you like DIY wind turbines, we’ve seen them made from 55 gallon drums, PVC pipe, and many other materials.

Filed under: green hacks, home hacks, how-to

And it's a surprisingly talented opponent, at that. Father-of-the-year, anyone?

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GPS is a godsend when it works. Problem is, there are plenty of places it doesn't work—tall skyscrapers, concrete overpasses, and other huge structures all block the satellite signal you need to navigate. Luckily, Swiss company u-blox just devised a chip that keeps you on course when the satellites drop out, using the most old-fashioned of navigation techniques: dead reckoning.

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If you're in the unenviable position of having to traverse the country by bus or train, you better make sure this map is on your phone.

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Imagine a laser that fires super-powerful blasts of light ten times a second. A laser with one quadrillion watts of power. That's one powerful piece of equipment—the most powerful—and it's exactly what's being built for the ELI-Beamlines science facility in the Czech Republic.

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F0r years, scientists have struggled to build graphene-based electronics that could do the same thing as silicon superconductor chips. A new breakthrough from an international team of scientists might just change all that. These geniuses just invented a new form of graphene that's ten times more conductive.

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It's being billed as the widest-looking, fastest-shooting, deepest peering telescope on Earth. Or at least it will be when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope comes online atop a remote Chilean mountain top in 2032. The LSST, combining cutting-edge optics and massive computing power, will scan huge swaths of the heavens and peer deeper into cosmic history than ever before.

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If I started telling you about a new all-wheel-drive, turbodiesel-powered off-roader, you'd probably think I was talking about a 4x4 truck or SUV, right? Wrong. Check out the RNT, a concept from Indian motorcycle company Hero that could be the only back-country survival tool a motorcycle adventurer would ever need.

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The idea of receiving traffic updates on your sat nav may suddenly seem tawdry next to this more futuristic alternative dreamed up by Renault: If you're driving along in its "KWID" concept car and you're worried about jams up ahead, you simply launch...

From robots to mind-reading, new programming languages to advanced communication systems, DARPA has fingers in many, many pies. And now, it's making all its open source code available by publishing the DARPA Open Catalog.

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Technologically speaking, smaller is virtually always better. So it's perhaps no surprise that scientists have developed the first ever single-molecule LED. But why is it potentially such a big deal?

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Pininfarina is known for turning Ferraris and other exotic cars into even more impressive works of art, so it's a safe assumption that its new 4.EVER Pininfarina Cambiano writing instrument is going to cost a small fortune when available. But with an inkless design that never needs a new cartridge, it could eventually pay for itself—after a century of use.

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This looks like a bizarrely-colored aerial image of a city at night, but in reality it's something much smaller, and much more fascinating: the tiny scaffolding and organelles that make up a single human cell. Harvard researchers caught this view using a new technique powered by light-up strands of custom-built DNA.

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Like, holy crap. Can you believe that that picture above is actually a photograph of wildebeests in Kenya and not some painting that is hung in a decorated hall of an art museum? It's unreal. It looks like fantasy land. But it's from a photo competition. In Focus shared the shortlist of winners of the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards and they're simply awesome.

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Not every struggling company story has to have a depressing ending. Though its troubles are far from over yet, Panasonic has just announced 73.7 billion yen ($730 million) in net earnings for Q3. That's up 20 percent over last year, a disastrous...

EVE:Valkyrie is no longer just a neat proof-of-concept demo for Oculus' prototype VR headset -- it's now an exclusive launch title. Today, Oculus announced that it'd be entering into a co-publishing agreement with developer CCP Games to make its...

KnowRoaming, the company behind the roaming SIM "stickers" that popped up on Kickstarter last year, has begun shipping its device to the first 500 backers. The $35 pre-order kit, which includes a SIM sticker and a single-use applicator, enables...

To stop bleeding, apply pressure—with tiny sponges. A group of veterans, scientists, and engineers in Oregon have a developed a device that uses small medical sponges to stop bleeding from gunshot wounds in just 15 seconds.

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It's a pumping lung in a box, basically. Al Jazeera America specifies that its more properly known as the Organ Care System (OCS) but it's basically a human donor long being kept alive and breathing out of the body inside a box. The OCS machine is used to keep the blood and oxygen flowing to the donor organ so that it can buy itself more time before the donor organ is given to the recipient.

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It hasn't been all that easy to make your own touchscreen-friendly gloves short of grabbing a needle and some conductive thread. With Tony Yu's upcoming Nanotips, however, it could be as simple as applying touch-up paint. The conductive liquid gives...

Globalstar's Sat-Fi won't be the only game in town for satellite hotspots. Iridium has unveiled the Iridium Go, a hotspot that lets up to five WiFi-equipped devices hop on the internet, send texts and make phone calls from just about anywhere on the...

As promised late last year, ASUS unveiled its new Chromebox packing Intel's fourth-generation Haswell processors today. The most compact Chromebox yet, the computer comes sporting either Intel's Celeron 2955U or i3-4010 processor. Another i7 version...

We've talked about why you should have more than one cooking oil in your kitchen, but this graphic breaks down the differences between them nicely. It shows you smoke points for common oils, and their most popular uses, all in one good-looking chart.

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It's no secret that subway maps are mere approximations of geography. Designed for maximum readability, they map the subway system onto stylized curves and evenly spaced stops. Still, the images of these familiar maps distorted by geographic accuracy are more striking than I even imagined.

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The Segway opened the floodgates for countless personal mobility devices, with designs that range from conservative to downright crazy. And the Aeyo—a cross between a scooter, a bicycle, and a pair of inline skates—falls somewhere in the middle of that scale.

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If you look at the wires behind your entertainment console, you're going to see different colors tangled up with different things leading to different places you forgot existed. It's an awful ugly mess. Seeing the brain is like that, only the opposite because in its chaos is beauty. Just look at the 3D brain scan above that shows every synapse, it's like a 3D Jackson Pollock painting.

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You may reach the internet via newfangled wireless connection most of the time, but all those ones and zeros cross the oceans the same way old-fashioned telephone connections did: by undersea cables. The map masters at TeleGeography have charted the course the internet takes to cross the seas in 2014, and the result is fascinatingly complex.

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This monochrome image of living tissue has some extremely unwelcome visitors lurking within it. Taken from some of the first ever 3D images of HIV at work, those little blue circles show the virus infecting the surrounding cells.

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Chips with graphene inside are theoretically quicker than plain silicon designs, but they've been slow in practice; the manufacturing process often damages the graphene, stripping away its speed advantage. That won't be a big problem with IBM's ...