In honor of Tom Brady’s return to football this weekend after serving a 4 game suspension for under-inflating game balls, we decided to do our own deflategate study. So, naturally, we put a football in our 120 kip test press and compressed... Learn More

For several years now, we have kicked around the idea of putting strain gages on a gun barrel.  Why might we want to do this you ask?  Two reasons: first, we like target shooting, and second, we’re huge instrumentation nerds.  Well, we... Learn More

Hey all, Here is an interesting video about Hexaflexagons. What’s a Hexaflexagon, you might ask? I wondered the same thing. Well it turns out that a flexagon is a flat model which folded in certain ways to display different faces than the... Learn More

1971 – Mariner 9 departs for Mars On 5/30, 1971, Mariner 9, an unmanned space probe, was launched toward Mars. Mariner 9 was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, but only by a slim margin – two soviet space probes reached... Learn More

In a previous blog entry, we described a software error that led to the loss of the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 spacecraft in June of 1996. In hindsight, the error—which basically amounted to a failure to recognize that the new and... Learn More

On June 4th, 1996, following 10 years of engineering development and an expenditure of $7 billion, the European Space Agency launched the Ariane 5 on its maiden voyage from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana. On board were four, expensive–and uninsured–satellites.... Learn More