If you’re reading this today. YOU’RE A TRUE ENGINEER

I get it. It’s shopping week. Your emails are flooded with offers.

And yet you’re here, taking time to read this beautiful newsletter (teary eyes emoji). BUT FEAR NOT! I have an email with my shopping list (in case you weren’t able to find good engineering-gadget deals) coming soon 👀

(1) To increase the pressure in a centrifugal pump (like in your washing machine), engineers: Increase the impeller diameter AND Increase the impeller speed.

(2) In a guitar string, to make a higher pitch note, the string must be: Under more tension.

(3) When forging metal (like making a sword), heating and hammering makes it: Stronger and denser.

Congratulations to Shannon, Doug, Tim, Randall, Mandy, Chandler, Tuong-Phu, Matt, Eric, James, Jim, Brandon, Marek, Logan, Victor, Todd, Ambrose, Melissa, Saen. It is absolutely awesome seeing so many of you in the winners’ bracket!

ALSO, last week's mystery gift winners, check your inboxes!

Btw, this week’s mystery gift is NEXT LEVEL. I have been hooked. 
Want it? Answer 👇

Predict the outcome:

Question 1: You drill a hole through the center of a spinning disc. Does it spin: Faster OR Slower?

Question 2: You increase the thickness of a metal wire carrying the same current. Does it get: Hotter OR Cooler?

Question 3: You increase the voltage to an electric motor. Does it draw: More current OR Less current?

Know the answers?
Reply with your picks here.

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You know what's been stuck in the Stone Age? Touch.
We got 4K screens and spatial audio, but when your phone "vibrates" to give you feedback, it's basically just buzzing like an angry bee.

Northwestern just made VoxeLite: a bandage-thin device that wraps around your fingertip and lets you ACTUALLY FEEL textures on flat touchscreens.

Here’s the engineering: it’s stretchy latex with tiny rubber nodes (pixels of touch) that use electroadhesion (the same effect that makes a balloon stick to a wall after you rub it). Apply voltage and each node grips the surface, tilts, and presses into your skin at 800 times per second: matching your touch receptors’ full frequency range. 

Test participants identified leather and corduroy with 81% accuracy.

Online shopping where you FEEL fabric?

VR where you sense a rubber band stretching?

Finally, touch catches up 😉

Read more here

Robots are pretty dumb at sensing compared to us.

They need tons of separate sensors just to do what ONE neuron does: see something, decide, and move.

USC and Loughborough University researchers built a transneuron that switches between acting like neurons from your visual cortex, planning regions, and motor areas.

How is it working?

A memristor: a component that physically remembers past electrical signals by changing its resistance. Small electrical tweaks make it behave like completely different neurons. They tested it against actual macaque neurons and got 100% accuracy reproducing different brain firing patterns.

This means robots with actual nervous systems that adapt in real-time, using WAY less energy than current AI.

Artificial brains, one neuron at a time 😂

Read more here

Direct Air Capture plants have one massive problem: they’re energy hogs.

Most need 10,000+ kilowatt-hours to capture one ton of CO2.

For context, that's like running your house for a month to remove what your car emits in a week.

Austria’s APU1 pilot plant does it with under 2,000 kWh per ton.

They pass air through granulated amines (materials that grab CO2), but they’ve optimized EVERYTHING: heating, cooling, air movement to slash energy use.

It’s container-sized, modular (stack them like LEGO), removes 50 tons yearly.

This matters because we NEED large-scale carbon removal, but if it costs too much energy, you’re burning fuel to capture CO2 from burning fuel.

I yet prefer real plants tbh… 😣

Read more here

Nobody really knows how lightning begins.

Can you believe it?

Like, we see 9 million bolts every day and we've been studying this since the 1950s, but the math doesn't add up.

The electric fields in thunderclouds are way too weak to trigger the massive discharges we see. 

So what's actually happening up there?

Austrian researchers just accidentally stumbled into an answer while trying to trap microscopic particles with laser beams (which is already wild on its own).

THE THING THAT'S BEEN BOTHERING SCIENTISTS FOR 70 YEARS

Here's the problem: ice crystals and ice pellets in thunderclouds smash into each other and swap electrical charges. 

Eventually the cloud gets SO charged that lightning happens. But when you measure the actual electric field strength inside clouds, it's nowhere near powerful enough to cause breakdown and create a lightning bolt.

Some people think cosmic rays ionize the air and kickstart everything. 

Others believe the ice crystals themselves create the first spark.

But these are mostly theories based on computer simulations and distant observations, not actual controlled lab experiments where you can see what's happening.

HOLDING A SINGLE PARTICLE HOSTAGE WITH LIGHT FOR WEEKS

PhD student Andrea Stöllner built this setup at ISTA that looks straight out of sci-fi: green laser beams bouncing between mirrors on a table that hisses like air escaping (it's anti-vibration, so even tiny movements don't screw things up).

The beams converge to form "optical tweezers": two focused laser beams that can trap one microscopic silica particle using nothing but light.

These particles are micron-sized, that's one-millionth of a meter.

They're transparent silica spheres that mimic ice crystals in real clouds.

And after years of refinement, they can hold A SINGLE PARTICLE for weeks.

When Stöllner first caught one two years ago (right before Christmas), she was over the moon. BUT it stayed trapped for exactly three minutes before escaping 😂

THE SPONTANEOUS DISCHARGE NOBODY EXPECTED

The lasers charge particles through a two-photon process: the particle absorbs two photons, which energizes electrons enough that they escape, leaving it positively charged.

They can control the charging rate by adjusting laser power and watch everything happen in real time.

But then something weird started happening.

Particles trapped for weeks would suddenly stop shaking as much. The charge would DROP super quickly in spontaneous bursts.

These microdischarges are tiny versions of what might be happening in thunderclouds when ice crystals spontaneously release charge.

"We don't know how it happens, but basically the charge just drops very quickly," Stöllner says. "That is actually pretty much the same question as lightning initiation, just on this tiny, tiny scale."

WHY THIS ACTUALLY MATTERS

Their model particles are way smaller than real ice crystals, but if they can decode these microscale charge dynamics, they might finally understand how lightning gets its first spark.

The team's optimistic about eventually creating "super tiny lightning sparks" in the lab.

The framework also applies beyond lightning: it could explain why Moon dust levitates and clogs lunar rovers (it gets charged by UV light and solar wind), or how charged particles behave in other planetary atmospheres.

We've theorized about lightning for seven decades mostly through simulations. 

Now we finally have the precision tools to test it 👀

Design Engineer II (Water Resources): Spicer Group
Stormwater whisperer keeping Michigan dry one drainage plan at a time.
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Structural Engineer: McCarl's
Making sure heavy industrial things stay standing instead of becoming expensive pancakes.
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Sustainability Designer: Thornton Tomasetti
Teaching buildings to shrink their carbon footprint and earn gold stars.
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