do you "rust" me?

Happy Tuesday, folks!

Welcome to This Week in Engineering

The WINNER of last week is:

🎉 Don McDaniel  🎉

His response is:

“1. Airplane
2. Rocket
3. Fuselage”

Also my intern (which is me xD) messed up the header last time.

Want to get featured in the next edition? Or maybe get some cool stickers sent over!

Then answer this right! 👀

Let’s test your engineering lingo 👀 
Complete these tricky (and a bit quirky) engineering phrases!

How did you do? Share your answers and let’s see who got them all right!

⦁ An MIT student just invented Ctrl+z for damaged paintings

Art restoration used to take months because of the need to paint really tiny spots. Alex Kachkine (an MIT student) said "what if we just printed a fix?" and created AI generated masks that stick onto damaged paintings.

His method scans a 600 year old painting, figures out what it originally looked like, then prints a restoration mask with 57,000+ colors. Total time? 3.5 hours instead of nine months.

He basically invented Photoshop's healing brush for real paintings. The mask peels off like a screen protector, so you can always reveal the original damage underneath if needed. TLDR: Museums can finally display all that "too broken to show" art they've been hoarding in storage basements.

⦁ Bedrock Ocean Raises $25M to Map the Seafloor with Robot Subs

Amazon’s latest experiment: a “humanoid park” where bipedal robots practice leaping out of Rivian vans to deliver your packages.

The goal?

We know more about the moon than our own ocean floor, which is peak human logic. Bedrock Ocean just raised $25 million to fix this embarrassment with robot subs that get the job done. Their underwater scouts run 12 hours on battery, process data onboard, and then surface to beam everything via Starlink. Two robots do the work of an entire mapping ship. With 80% of our oceans still unmapped, maybe it's time we stopped ignoring the 71% of our planet that's underwater.

Rust is that annoying friend who shows up uninvited, eats all your food (in this case, your iron), and refuses to leave.

If you leave any piece of iron outside for a while and you’ll watch it slowly turn into flaky orange dust. It's been humanity's most expensive problem for centuries, costing us a mindboggling $2.5 trillion globally in corrosion damage.

But researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem just created what might be the ultimate rust shield: a dual layer coating that offers 99.6% protection against iron corrosion.

How does it work?

The team developed a two part system:

First, they apply an ultrathin molecular primer made of n-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) that forms an incredibly tight chemical bond directly with the iron surface. Think of it as the world's strongest glue at the molecular level.

Then comes a tough polymer layer that sticks to this primer like nothing else.

Does it actually work?

The researchers put this coating through hell: excessive and prolonged exposure to highly corrosive saltwater, the kind of conditions that would normally eat through regular protective coatings like acid does through paper.

The result? While uncoated iron turned into rusty orange mush, the protected iron looked like it had just rolled off the factory floor. Check it out:

Bridges usually need more paint jobs than a Kardashian’s face, but all that is about to change thanks to this new coating.

The $8.93 billion corrosion inhibitor market is about to get very interesting. It's like the entire rust-fighting industry just got a cheat code.

Time to pour one out for rust 🥂 it had a good run, but science just served it an eviction notice.

This discovery comes at a perfect time. We're building more infrastructure than ever, from massive bridges to offshore wind farms, all while trying to be more sustainable. A coating that extends the lifespan of iron-based materials by decades means less waste, fewer resources spent on maintenance, and more reliable infrastructure.

What infrastructure project would you want to see get this rust-proof treatment first?

• Propulsion System Analysis Engineer - RTX
  Apply if you like making things go whoosh without the whole “exploding” part.

• Manufacturing Engineer - Quest Global
  Apply if you dream in assembly lines and Excel sheets whisper sweet nothings.
  

• Senior Electrical Project Engineer - Affiliated Engineers, Inc.
  Apply if your sparks fly only in circuits, not conversations.

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