robot fight club!

Happy Tuesday, folks!

Welcome to This Week in Engineering

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NOW ON TO THE FUN STUFF!!

Last week’s winners are:

Stickers coming your way soon. Keep an eye out for an email from us shortly 👀

It’s been a while since we had the last crossword…so here’s another one to keep those engineering brains buzzing!

But don’t worry, I promise this one won’t require a PhD in “Advanced Overthinking.”

⦁ Microsoft Just Ordered World's First Fusion Power Plant (It's Actually Being Built)

Remember how fusion power has been “just 20 years away” for the past 50 years?

Helion Energy just started construction on what could be the world’s first commercial fusion plant. They’re building it in Washington state to power Microsoft’s data centers by 2028 (there’s an actual contract)

Here’s how it works: Instead of splitting atoms apart (fission), fusion smashes light atoms together to release energy.

TLDR: Minimal radioactive waste + unlimited fuel

The challenge: Nobody has figured out how to make fusion produce more energy than it takes to run the reaction. Helion thinks they’ve cracked it with their direct energy conversion system that skips steam turbines entirely.

Either we’re about to witness the energy revolution, or a very expensive science experiment.

Honestly? I'm rooting for them. My electricity bill could use some help 😂

⦁ Scientists Just Built a Cosmic Sunscreen for Solar Panels

I get confused seeing so many sunscreen options when I search for it. Now they’re making it for solar panels?

Turns out space is really, really good at destroying stuff..

Researchers at the University of Surrey just solved one of the biggest problems with perovskite solar cells in space: getting wrecked by radiation. 

The breakthrough: They created a thin protective coating using propane-1,3-diammonium iodide (basically a cosmic sunscreen (not the one you thought)) that shields the fragile parts from getting destroyed.

How good is it? They exposed coated and uncoated cells to over 20 years worth of space radiation. The unprotected ones got destroyed in 8 minutes. The protected ones kept working after 30 minutes with barely any efficiency loss.

This could make space solar power way lighter and cheaper than current options 👀

⦁ China Just Hosted Robot Fight Club (It was absolutely insane)

I thought I’d seen everything, then China put two humanoid robots in a boxing ring and told them to go at it.

We're talking jabs, kicks, defensive moves, and one robot even grabbed and turned its opponent at one point.

Nope…these aren't remote-controlled toys.

The tech behind it: These Unitree G1 humanoid robots are 4.3 feet tall and have 120 newton-meters of torque in their joints.

Plus, they’ve got enough computing power to make split-second decisions and coordinate their entire body for combat.

I can go on about them, instead just watch the insanity here...

I really don’t want to spill coffee by mistake on someone with bot as their bodyguard…

Remember the story of King Midas?

The guy who turned everything he touched into gold and then immediately regretted it when he couldn't eat or hug anyone?

Okay okay, I’ll get to the point…

Physicists at the University of Kansas just did something similar in the Large Hadron Collider: that $10 billion particle smasher that has gotten a lot of attention for finding the Higgs boson (what scientists have named "God particle" because it explains why everything in the universe has mass) and for making people worry it might create tiny black holes.
Spoiler: it can't actually destroy the world, despite what internet conspiracy theories say.

The fun part: they weren't even trying to make gold.

What everyone else was studying vs. what actually mattered

Here's how the LHC normally works: scientists fire particles at each other at 99.9% the speed of light, they collide, and explode into showers of smaller particles. Everyone studies those explosive collisions because that's where the "exciting" discoveries happen.

But Professor Daniel Tapia Takaki had a different idea: "What if the most interesting stuff happens when particles DON'T actually hit each other?"

Sounds backwards, right?

It's like studying car accidents by watching cars that almost crash but swerve at the last second.

The only difference is that these "near misses" were happening constantly, but most scientists ignored them as boring background noise.

How you accidentally turn lead into gold

When you fire lead atoms around the LHC's 17-mile underground track at near light speed, something cool (I hope this fascinates you too) happens. These speeding lead atoms start glowing as they emit incredibly powerful light particles aka photons.

These aren't the normal ones that are in your phone's flashlight. These are high energy photons with enough power to actually knock pieces off other atoms.

Here's where physics gets fun: when these super-powered photons hit a lead atom (which has 82 protons), they can knock protons right out of it.

• Remove one proton from lead (82 protons)? You get thallium (81 protons)

• Remove two? Mercury (80 protons)

• Remove three? Gold (79 protons)

That's it.

Change the number of protons, change the element.

Medieval alchemists had the right idea, but they just needed a $10 billion particle accelerator instead of mixing chemicals in their basement.

Why this discovery matters beyond cool factor

The Kansas team built new detectors specifically to catch quiet transformations that everyone else was missing.

But it’s not as simple as them becoming billionaires, because these gold atoms sometimes hit the collider walls and trigger safety systems.

Scientists are planning to build colliders up to 60 miles long.

Before they spend trillions on these machines, they need to understand what weird byproducts might show up and potentially break things.

The reality check

These gold atoms exist for only fractions of a second before decaying into other elements. So no, you can't get rich with a backyard particle accelerator.

Plus the electricity bill alone would cost more than any gold you'd make.

But this proves we're still discovering completely unexpected physics in our most advanced machines: often in the processes we weren't even bothering about.

• Structural Engineer: Westinghouse Electric Co
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• Bridge Engineer: HNTB
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• Roadway Engineer: Jacobs
  Perfect for engineers who think system-to-system interchanges sound like the ultimate engineering Jenga puzzle.

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