Hey nerds,

January is that weird part of the year where your calendar says “new beginning,” but your brain is still buffering.

Now that everyone’s slowly remembering how thinking works again, we’re back to business. Interesting ideas, strange science, and the kind of questions that make you pause mid-scroll and go, “Wait… is that actually true?”

Q1: You're pouring concrete for a massive dam. If you let it cure naturally without any cooling system, it will…
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

Q3: If you drill a hole straight through Earth's center and drop a ball in (ignoring air resistance and magma), the ball will…
B) Oscillate back and forth through the planet forever

We had a lot of replies to last week’s quiz, love to see 2026 start with so much passion!

Also, yes, trivia is back.

Get the answers right, and there’s something in it for you. We updated the rewards because motivation matters!

Q1: You have a perfectly sealed thermos filled with boiling water. You put it in outer space. What happens to the water over time?
A) It instantly freezes solid
B) It slowly cools down until it reaches absolute zero
C) It stays hot for a surprisingly long time
D) It explodes because space is a vacuum

Q2: You build a bridge using a material that is infinitely strong in tension but extremely weak in compression. What kind of bridge design works best?
A) Arch bridge
B) Beam bridge
C) Suspension bridge
D) Cantilever bridge

Q3: A modern smartphone has no moving parts (no fans, no motors). Yet it still gets warm when you use it. Where does most of that heat actually come from?
A) Friction between electrons moving through wires
B) Energy lost when transistors switch on and off
C) Radio waves bouncing inside the phone
D) The battery is chemically heating itself

Hit reply with your answers.
Let’s see who’s actually awake 👀

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Making blue LEDs is HARD because it has more energy than green or red, which means you need high-energy input to create it.

Current OLED displays struggle to produce efficient blue without burning out.

Princeton researchers found a workaround: take low-energy light and upgrade it.

The technique is called triplet-fusion upconversion.

Molecules absorb green light and temporarily store that energy by bumping electrons into higher orbitals. When two excited molecules collide, they combine their stored energy and release it as higher-energy blue or UV light.

Problem: this works great in liquids where molecules bounce around freely.

In solids, they're stuck in place and can't collide.

But they found a solution which is a thin silver film. When light hits silver, it creates plasmons (oscillations of free electrons on the metal surface) that concentrate the electromagnetic field.

That concentrated field boosts light absorption by the upconversion molecules by 10x and cuts the required input power by 19x.

Translation: solid-state upconversion that actually works. Blue OLEDs that don't suck might finally be possible.

Read more here

Compressed air is everywhere in factories and it's also full of static charge.

Dust and water droplets slam into pipe walls, pick up electrons, and build up voltage. Usually that's just annoying. Sometimes it sparks and blows things up.

Researchers built a generator that harvests that static using a Tesla turbine: a bladeless design Nikola Tesla patented in 1913. Instead of angled blades deflecting airflow, Tesla's turbine uses smooth, closely-spaced discs. Air clings to the surfaces and transfers momentum through viscous drag as it spirals inward.

The new device pairs this century-old concept with triboelectric materials. At 0.2 MPa pressure, the rotator spins at 8,472 RPM through surface friction alone. Peak output: 800 V and 2.5 A at 325 Hz.

Bonus: that high-voltage output generates negative ions that neutralize dust and moisture in the air.

So you get power AND cleaner air from the same system.

TLDR: The static electricity that used to be a hazard becomes the fuel.

Read more here

Touch a hot stove, you remember. Current robot sensors don't.

They're binary (touch/no touch) and stateless (pain forgotten immediately).

Break them and you replace the whole thing.

Researchers at Northeast Normal University in China built electronic "pain nerves" that actually behave like yours.

The key: a new type of memristor made from gelatin (yes, the same protein in collagen).

Most memristors flip between two states. These have 16 stable levels, like a dimmer switch instead of a light switch. Each level represents a different pain intensity.

After getting "injured," they become MORE sensitive. Just like real nerves.

Over time, they calm back down. Also like real nerves.

Damaged?
Heat to 60°C and the gelatin literally re-bonds itself.

The team connected their sensor to a mouse's sciatic nerve and triggered actual muscle reflexes.

For robots, this means learning what's dangerous WITHOUT catastrophic damage. Feel pain. Remember it. Avoid it next time.

SOOO will our robots react if you beat them up 👀

Read more here

Watch a bird fly and you'll see something aircraft can't do: wings that constantly adjust.

Curving into a dive/ flattening for a glide / twisting to catch a gust / every feather repositioning in real time.

Now look at an airplane wing.

It's basically a metal plank with some hinged flaps bolted on.

Those flaps can tilt up or down, but the wing itself is quite rigid.

This is a problem as the wing shape that's optimal for takeoff isn't optimal for cruising. The angle that works at sea level isn't ideal at 35,000 feet.

Fixed wings are a compromise, and compromises cost fuel.

Engineers have known this for decades.

So why don't we have morphing wings yet?

THE MATERIALS PROBLEM NOBODY COULD SOLVE

Building a wing that changes shape sounds simple in theory (we just need to make it flexible).

But aircraft wings deal with ENORMOUS forces.

At cruising speed, the pressure difference between the top and bottom of a wing can exceed 1,000 pounds per square foot. The wing has to flex slightly to absorb gusts without snapping, but it also has to hold its shape precisely enough to generate lift.

Most flexible materials are weak and most strong materials are rigid.

And the few materials that are both flexible AND strong have another problem: they don't spring back.

Bend aluminum and it stays bent. That's called plastic deformation.

For a morphing wing to work, you need a material that can deform significantly under aerodynamic loads, then snap back to its original shape when you want to change configuration.

Over and over. Thousands of times per flight.

ENTER THE SHAPE MEMORY ALLOY

Nickel-titanium alloys do it: at low temperatures, you can bend them into any shape you want. They'll stay bent indefinitely. But heat them up past a specific threshold and they SNAP back to their original form.

This happens because of a phase change in the crystal structure.

At low temperatures, the atoms arrange in a pattern called martensite, which is soft and easily deformed.

Heat it up and the atoms rearrange into austenite, a stiffer cubic structure that only exists in one configuration: whatever shape you originally set (it’s like it has a memory). 

Engineers have been trying to use this for morphing aircraft since the 1990s.

The problem is they can’t make it take complex shapes.

Traditional manufacturing can produce nitinol wires and sheets, but aerospace needs intricate 3D structures that can handle stress from multiple directions.

HOW A WEED SOLVED THE PROBLEM

A team at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics was looking at the seedcoat of Portulaca oleracea, a common succulent.

Under a microscope, the outer layer has a wavy honeycomb pattern. Those waves distribute pressure evenly across the surface, letting a thin, flexible membrane handle surprisingly large forces.

The researchers translated that biological pattern into nickel-titanium using laser powder bed fusion, an extremely precise form of metal 3D printing. Layer by layer, they built a honeycomb structure with wavy cell walls just 0.3 millimeters across.

Finally they produced a metal mesh that stretches 38% before breaking (most metals fail below 10%), recovers 96% of its original shape when heated, and handles aerodynamic loads that would crush traditional flexible materials.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR AIRCRAFT

The team built prototype wing sections and tested them at temperatures matching high-altitude flight. The wings morphed smoothly across a 50-degree range, from −25° to +25° angle of attack (remember it transforms just by temperature and not because of a motor)

The next step is adding sensors so the wing can monitor its own deformation and adjust automatically.

Imagine a wing that feels turbulence and reconfigures in milliseconds, the way a bird's feathers do.

We've had shape memory alloys for 60 years.
We've had morphing wing concepts for 30.

What we didn't have was a way to make the material into structures that could actually survive flight.

A common weed showed them how!!

Robotics Electrical Engineer – Tutor Intelligence, Watertown, MA
Wiring robot brains so they don't accidentally electrocute themselves.
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Firmware Engineer, ASIC Drivers – OpenAI, San Francisco, CA
Keeping custom AI chips from throwing firmware tantrums.
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Production Engineer – ASML, Wilton, CT
Optimizing machines that print chips smaller than dust particles.
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