18 months ago, This Week in Engineering started with a simple idea. Bringing the coolest engineering breakthroughs to a lovely group of nerds, in simple, but entertaining language.

Today, it’s grown to 62k audience members, and hundreds play the quiz every week.

I spend 3-5 hours every Tuesday turning dense research papers into something that respects your intelligence without making your eyes glaze over. Watching this community form has been the best part of my week, every week.

But it's not sustainable anymore. I can't keep doing this without support.

This is the last month unless something changes. If this newsletter has mattered to you, reply and tell me. Forward it to someone. Make an intro to your marketing team who may be interested in sponsoring.

I don't want to write a goodbye email next month.

- Adam

We had a lot of replies to last week’s quiz, love to see 2026 start with so much passion! I’ll be getting you your gifts this week!

Solid-state batteries should be the future. Replace the flammable liquid electrolyte with a ceramic and you get something safer, denser, faster-charging. Everyone's been working on this for decades.

The problem: ceramics are brittle.

Every charge cycle, lithium atoms try to plate onto the electrode surface.

Some of them find tiny surface defects and wedge themselves in. This opens up the crack further allowing more lithium in, slowly killing the battery.

Stanford researchers figured out that coating the ceramic with a 3-nanometer silver film fixes this. 

Heat to 300°C and silver ions diffuse INTO the ceramic structure, replacing smaller lithium atoms in the crystal lattice. Bigger atoms, tighter packing, harder to crack.

Previous studies used metallic silver sitting on top. This team used dissolved silver ions (Ag+) that actually integrate into the ceramic. The surface becomes five times more fracture-resistant.

Copper works too, which is cheaper.

Next: testing on full battery cells over thousands of cycles to see if it holds up in real EVs.

Read more here

Every text you send passes through surface acoustic waves. 

Radio signal comes in from a cell tower, gets converted to vibrations traveling across a chip surface, unwanted frequencies get filtered out, then back to radio. 

These waves are basically microscopic earthquakes, rippling across the top of a material instead of through the earth.

Current SAW filters work at around 4 GHz but need multiple chips and bulky external power systems. 

Researchers at CU Boulder built a phonon laser that generates these waves on a single chip. 

Three-layer sandwich: silicon base, lithium niobate in the middle (piezoelectric, so it converts electricity into vibration), and indium gallium arsenide on top (accelerates electrons to ridiculous speeds when you apply voltage).

Apply current and waves form in the lithium niobate layer. 

They bounce back and forth, amplifying with each pass, exactly like light in a laser cavity. Already hitting 1 GHz with potential for hundreds.

All your phone's radio components on one chip. 

Thinner devices, longer battery, faster wireless. The earthquake just got an upgrade.

Read more here

Glass is pretty ordinary at its job. Sure it keeps some of the wind and noise out, but it also lets light (with UV radiation) through, slowly aging your skin and your furniture. 

Smart glass is a part solution, but needs power, sensors, control systems.

Korean researchers made transparent wood that handles everything passively. 

Start with balsa. Chemically remove the lignin (that's what makes wood brown and opaque). 

Fill the remaining porous structure with polymer-dispersed liquid crystals.

At room temperature: 28% light transmittance, frosted, private. 

At 40°C: 78% transmittance, nearly clear. The liquid crystals scatter light when cool and align when warm. 

Temperature goes up, window clears. Temperature drops, window frosts. No electricity or smart home systems.

The material also blocks nearly 100% of UVA through something called J-aggregation (the molecular arrangement happens to absorb UV wavelengths). 

Thermal conductivity is 0.197 W/m·K versus 0.911 for glass.

At night, when it's cool outside, the frosted state means people can't see in when your lights are on. Privacy without blinds. The window just figures it out.

Read more here

Anyone who's designed offshore infrastructure knows about vortex-induced vibration.

It destroys pipelines, cracks platforms - armies of engineers exist just to suppress it.

Water flows past a pipe. As it wraps around, tiny whirlpools form in the wake. 

They don't form evenly. One spins off the left side, then the right, then left again.

Each vortex shoves the pipe sideways.

Match those shoves to the pipe's natural frequency and you get resonance, the metal fatigues and the pipeline ruptures.

Engineers have thrown everything at this problem.
Helical strakes. Fairings. Dampers.

A CYLINDER ON A PENDULUM

Hang a cylinder from a shaft so it swings freely. Submerge it in flowing water.

The same vortex shedding that destroys pipelines makes the cylinder swing, which turns a shaft. Connect it to a generator.

Earlier underwater turbine systems capture 25-35% of available power, but every component sits in seawater. The whole system is prone to corrosion, salt intrusion, biofouling etc.

"The beauty of this system is that only the cylinder is in the water," Huera says. "Everything else, the shaft, the transmissions, the generator, can be outside."

His pendulum keeps everything above the waterline. Only a dumb cylinder gets wet.

THE NUMBERS

Efficiency: about 15%. Roughly half what a turbine delivers.

But a tube hanging from an axle has more obvious failure modes and easy repairs. 

You could deploy these in shallow rivers, tidal channels, anywhere a turbine would be overkill.

Lab tests in a water channel confirmed the concept. 

Sensors measured oscillation angles while electromagnetic brakes simulated power loads across different conditions.

Next: optimize power extraction, extend the working speed range, figure out whether arrays of pendulums interfere with each other or amplify the effect.

Vortex-induced vibration spent decades as an engineering problem - billions went into suppression. Turns out it's also a power source 🌊

Environmental Engineer - John Deere, Fuquay Varina, NC
Making sure tractors stay green without making the planet mad.
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Senior Electrical Engineer - Syska Hennessy Group, Atlanta, GA
Designing power systems so skyscrapers don't accidentally become fancy candle holders.
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Mechanical Engineer - Solcoa
Designing reactors extracting rare metals so America stops asking China nicely.
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