Hey nerds!

Hope you survived the holidays without explaining what you do for a living to your relatives for the 47th time.

I think the coolest gift I got during the holidays was scrubbing ALL OF MY PERSONAL INFO from the internet!! My spam calls and texts are way down, and my personal happiness is way up. Incogni is no joke. I love it.

Here’s their special offer for subscribers of TWiE :) - hope you enjoy!

BTW - We're kicking off the year with some cool stuff.

You know, standard tuesday trivia 👀.

This week's riddles are back to normal difficulty, with the hope by Q2 we move to max difficulty!

Q1: A spinning ice skater pulls their arms in and spins faster. If they're on a frictionless turntable and throw a heavy ball straight outward, they will…
B) Spin slower but keep the same direction

Q2: You're designing a pressure vessel. Doubling the wall thickness increases burst pressure by…
A) 2x (linear relationship)

Q3: In a transformer with a 10:1 turn ratio, if you push 10A through the primary coil, the secondary coil delivers…
A) 100A at 1/10th the voltage

Noone got the 1st one right but a 2/3 is good enough for me.

The first question was tricky - when the skater throws a heavy ball straight outward, that ball carries away a significant amount of mass.

Because the mass is moving away from the axis of rotation, it takes a large portion of the system's angular momentum with it. With less total angular momentum remaining in the skater's body, they must slow down without changing direction.

Congratulations to Katie, Ellie, Smith, Akash!

You know, standard Tuesday trivia 👀
This week's riddles are back to normal difficulty, with the hope by Q2 we move to max difficulty!

If you nail the below, you’re going to get something cool (we’ve refreshed the prize pool).

Q1: You're pouring concrete for a massive dam. If you let it cure naturally without any cooling system, it will…
A) Crack from heat buildup and be structurally compromised
B) Take about 3 months to fully cure and harden
C) Generate so much heat that it would take over 100 years to cool down naturally

Q2: A guitar string and a steel cable of the same length are both tuned to the same pitch. The steel cable will…
A) Vibrate at the same frequency but require way more tension
B) Sound identical because frequency only depends on length
C) Be impossible to tune to the same pitch due to mass differences

Q3: If you drill a hole straight through Earth's center and drop a ball in (ignoring air resistance and magma), the ball will…
A) Fall to the center and stop there due to gravity canceling out
B) Oscillate back and forth through the planet forever
C) Accelerate continuously until it hits the other side at maximum speed

If you think you know the answers,
Reply HERE 👇

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Desalination plants turn seawater into drinking water.

They also cost a fortune and burn tons of energy.

Norwegian startup Flocean solved this by just going deeper…

Their first underwater desalination plant launches in 2026, sitting 300-600 meters below the surface.

Here's why depth matters: desalination requires pressure to push water through salt-filtering membranes.

On land, you generate it with pumps.

Underwater, the ocean provides it for free. Every 10 meters adds another atmosphere of pressure.

Result: 30-50% less energy, 30-50% fewer emissions.

Bonus: at those depths, no sunlight means fewer bacteria.

The water arrives cleaner and needs less treatment.

Capital costs run 7-8x lower than land-based plants. Without killing fish near shore.

Half the world is running out of fresh water. The solution might be putting the machinery where the water already is.

Read more here

Dark matter makes up 85% of the universe. And yet we've never seen it.

One theory: it's made of axions, hypothetical particles that barely interact with regular matter. If they exist, they should occasionally convert into photons inside strong magnetic fields. The signal would be unimaginably faint.

The QUAX collaboration in Italy built a quantum-powered detector to find out.

Picture a copper cavity inside a massive magnet, cooled to near absolute zero.

Tune it to a specific frequency and it amplifies any axion-to-photon conversions at that frequency.

It's basically a radio.

Except you're scanning for a station that might not exist.

Their system probes axion masses in a range that recent theories say could explain the universe's "missing" mass.

They haven't found anything yet.

But they've proven the detector works, it's tunable, and it scans with extreme sensitivity. If axions exist, this is the kind of machine that might catch one.

Read more here

Okay, so there's this thing called a polariton, which is basically when light and matter get way too close and merge into a hybrid particle. Like if Goku and Vegeta did the fusion dance, but it's photons and atoms.

Researchers just dropped a how-to guide on controlling these polaritons in materials that are literally a few atoms thick. We're talking thinner-than-paper levels here.

By using special low-symmetry materials, they can make light behave in absolutely bonkers ways, like bending backward (negative refraction) or traveling only in specific directions, like there's an invisible highway for photons.

Why does this matter? Because controlling light at the atomic scale unlocks:

Light goes in straight lines. LOL no more. We can actually steer it at the atomic level like we're driving a Ferrari made of photons.

Here's a sad secret about microscopes: they blur everything.

And that’s simple physics at play (okay not that simple).

When light passes through a lens, it doesn't land in a perfect point.
It spreads into a tiny blob. This is the Point Spread Function, or PSF.

Every image you see through a microscope is the real thing smeared by this blob.

Like looking through a foggy window.

The fog doesn't add anything, it just spreads each point of light into a little smudge.

Here's the thing: if you know EXACTLY what the smudge looks like, you can mathematically reverse it.

Take the blurry image, feed in the smudge pattern, run an algorithm, and the sharp original pops out.

This is called deconvolution and it works great.

IF you know exactly what the smudge looks like.

THE TWO WAYS WE'VE BEEN DOING THIS (AND WHY BOTH SUCK)

Method one: calculate it theoretically. Plug in your lens specs, wavelength of light, refractive index. Physics equations spit out what the smudge "should" be.

Works okay for basic setups. Falls apart the moment you modify your microscope to do anything interesting, like changing the aperture shape to see deeper into tissue. The equations can't account for every real-world quirk.

Method two: measure it directly. Image fluorescent beads that are smaller than the smudge itself. Whatever blob you see IS your PSF.

Problem? Those beads are tiny. They barely emit any light. And the signal gets weaker the deeper you image. Your "measurement" ends up being mostly noise.

So scientists have been stuck choosing between "theoretically wrong" and "experimentally noisy."

THE WORKAROUND

A team from Shenzhen University realized you don't need impossibly tiny beads. You can use a regular fluorescent sample instead.

Here's how it works:

First, image a sample with a standard wide-field microscope. The smudge pattern for basic wide-field IS well understood. Run deconvolution to get a clean, sharp version. This becomes your reference: you now know what that sample actually looks like.

Second, image THE SAME sample with your modified microscope. Now you have a blurry image with an unknown smudge pattern.

Third, work backwards. You know the clean original. You know the blurry result. What smudge pattern turns one into the other?

Run an optimization and the PSF pops out.

WHY THIS IS BETTER

Regular samples are bright. Way more photons than tiny beads. More light means less noise means a more accurate smudge map.

And because you're using your actual microscope on a real sample, the PSF you compute captures everything: lens imperfections, alignment issues, whatever modifications you've made.

No theoretical assumptions required.

THE RESULTS

They tested it on potato tubers, wheat seeds, pollen grains, bovine artery cells.

Their method resolved double-layer cell structures that traditional approaches smeared into one. It recovered starch granules that were completely invisible in the raw images.

So dramatically sharper results with the SAME microscope.

TLDR: Every microscope lies a little. Now we have a better way to catch it 😆

Sr. Firmware Engineer/Electrical Engineer – Lockheed Martin, Moorestown, NJ
Writing code that makes radar systems work so fighter jets don't accidentally mistake a flock of geese for enemy aircraft.
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System Layout Engineer – Segula Technologies, Auburn Hills, MI
Playing 3D Tetris with conveyor systems and factory equipment so manufacturing doesn't turn into a real-life game of "where did we put that giant robot arm again?"
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ASIC Engineering Technical Leader – Cisco, San Jose, CA
Designing the silicon brains that power the internet so your video calls don't freeze mid-sentence and make you look like a glitchy NPC.
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