Wishing you all an epic New Year party tomorrow.

I know you’re probably not in a mood to really be solving engineering riddles at this time of the year, so I'm making this week's questions easier.

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…
A) Spin faster in the same direction
B) Spin slower but keep the same direction
C) Start spinning in the opposite direction

Q2: You're designing a pressure vessel. Doubling the wall thickness increases burst pressure by…
A) 2x (linear relationship)
B) 4x (squared relationship)
C) Exactly 2x only if diameter also doubles

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
B) 1A at 10x the voltage
C) 10A at the same voltage (turns don't affect current)

If you think you know the answers,
Reply HERE 👇

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Bigger lenses = better resolution.

That's been the rule forever because resolution depends on how much light you can gather.

But building giant precision lenses is expensive and a nightmare to align. UNTIL NOW

Researchers at UConn borrowed a trick from the Event Horizon Telescope (the one that photographed a black hole) and made it work with visible light. Instead of one giant lens, they use an array of small sensors that each capture raw light patterns.

Then software syncs everything AFTER the fact, creating a virtual aperture way larger than any physical sensor.

Here's the thing: this should be impossible. Visible light has such short wavelengths that you'd need nanometer-perfect alignment between sensors. Their system, called MASI, just... doesn't bother.

Each sensor works independently, and algorithms handle the synchronization computationally. The result is sub-micron resolution from centimeters away, WITH NO LENS. They've already used it to image firing pin marks on bullet cartridges.

What I find spooky is that adding more sensors just makes it better without exponential complexity.

TLDR: Software is literally replacing glass.

Read more here

The dream: plug in your EV, grab a coffee, drive away fully charged.

The reality: sit there for 30 minutes watching a progress bar like it's a Windows XP file transfer.

The problems are more the battery than the chargers. 

The graphite anode in your EV battery has a speed limit.

Push lithium ions into it too fast and instead of absorbing them, it just coats itself in lithium metal. That's called plating, and it kills battery life and creates fire risks.

Fullerenes (carbon molecules shaped like tiny soccer balls) are great at handling lithium.

The problem: they dissolve in battery electrolyte. Dealbreaker.

Researchers at Tohoku University figured out a fix.

They bridged fullerene cages together using magnesium atoms, creating a stable 2D framework called Mg4C60.

The magnesium forms carbon-carbon bonds between cages, turning loose molecules into a connected lattice that WON'T dissolve.

Each individual cage can flex and distort as lithium moves in and out, but the overall structure stays locked in place.

It's like chain mail for molecules: flexible pieces, rigid system.

Performance: 2,600+ charge cycles with minimal capacity loss, even during rapid charging.

If this makes it to production, the charging bottleneck shifts to infrastructure.

TLDR: Your EV charges in 5 minutes instead of 30. Gas stations become the slow option.

Read more here

Imagine ordering one coffee and getting three - confused. Right?

A similar sort of thing happens with quantum computing.

For context: quantum computers run on photons, individual particles of light that carry quantum information.

Generating photons one at a time is messy though. Lasers create stray photons. Atoms sometimes emit extras. Both contaminate your signal and tank performance.

Extra photons = corrupted data.

Filtering out extra photons meant slower operations and less reliable quantum systems.

Researchers at the University of Iowa just figured out how to cancel out those stray photons using the same laser scatter that was causing the problem in the first place.

Here’s how it works: the unwanted photons match the wavelength of the laser light used to generate them. 

The team tuned the system so these stray photons interfere destructively with each other and cancel out. 

It's like noise-canceling headphones, but for light.

Instead of blocking noise, you're making the noise fight itself.

The result is a much purer stream of single photons.

This matters because cleaner photon streams are easier to synchronize and scale. They're also harder to intercept, which strengthens quantum encryption.

Still theoretical for now, but lab tests are coming.

Read more here

Just as a sidenote - if you're working with membrane bioreactors and want a deeper dive on the tech, Simon Judd's MBR pocketbook is worth reading - comprehensive data on membrane bioreactor systems.

Scientists Just Discovered a Third Kind of Magnetism (And It Could Fix AI’s Memory Problem)

You probably learned there are two types of magnetic materials.

Ferromagnets are the ones you know: fridge magnets, compass needles, hard drives. They have tiny atomic magnets (called spins) that all point the same direction, creating a strong north-south pole. Easy to read, easy to write. But also easy to mess up. Stray magnetic fields from nearby electronics can scramble your data.

Antiferromagnets are the opposite. Their spins alternate: up, down, up, down. This means the magnetic fields cancel out completely. Nothing can interfere with them because there’s nothing TO interfere with. Super stable. But here’s the catch: if there’s no net magnetism, how do you actually READ the data? You can’t detect something that doesn’t exist.

For decades, engineers have been stuck choosing between “easy to use but fragile” and “stable but unreadable.”

ENTER ALTERMAGNETS.

A team from Japan just confirmed that ultra-thin films of ruthenium dioxide belong to this third category of magnetism that physicists only recently recognized even exists.

Here’s what makes them interesting: like antiferromagnets, their spins alternate and cancel out. No net magnetism or anything external fields to grab onto. BUT (and this is the key) the electrons moving through the material still “feel” the spin arrangement.

The electrical resistance changes depending on which way the spins point.

So you get antiferromagnet-level stability with ferromagnet-level readability.

The best of both worlds.

HOW THEY ACTUALLY PROVED IT

The tricky part was making films where all the crystals point the same direction. Previous experiments had inconsistent results because the crystal orientations were all over the place.

The team grew ruthenium dioxide on sapphire substrates under carefully controlled conditions, forcing the crystals to align uniformly.

Then they blasted the films with X-rays tuned to detect magnetic ordering.

The X-rays confirmed the spins cancel out (no net poles). But electrical measurements showed the resistance DID change based on spin direction.

That’s the signature of altermagnetism: magnetically invisible, but electronically detectable.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR AI

Memory chips are the bottleneck.

AI systems need to read and write data billions of times per second.

Current magnetic memory is either fast but unstable, or stable but slow.

Altermagnetic memory could be both dense (because you can pack bits closer without them interfering) and fast (because you can read them electrically).

The team is already working on building actual memory devices from these films.

We might finally get storage that keeps up with how fast AI thinks 👀

Does that mean more engineering breakthroughs every week??

Electrical Engineer - Herzig Engineering
Power systems safety detective making sure electrical grids don't spontaneously become fireworks.
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Senior Hardware Engineer - Our Next Energy, Inc
Battery babysitter designing circuits that keep lithium from turning into fireworks.
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Sustainability Engineer - Tranter, Houston
Teaching pressure vessels to go green without blowing up the planet.
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