what's in the box?

That's basically what nuclear physicists have been doing with atomic nuclei for decades. Except the "present"...

August 26, 2025

Happy Tuesday, folks!

Welcome to This Week in Engineering

Quick heads up for all you water and wastewater engineers out there - there's a free virtual water summit coming up that looks super interesting.

They're covering everything from AI in water treatment to the the application of modern GIS systems.

Now back to our regularly scheduled engineering chaos...

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I thought this was the future (like 2050). I didn’t see this happening in 2025 already .But this one shows where we’re heading.

St Vincent's Hospital used two different surgical robots working together to remove a throat tumor from a 27-year-old man while keeping his voice and ability to eat completely intact.

How? The first robot (da Vinci) went in through the mouth to cut out the tumor.
Then the second robot (Symani) did the delicate microsurgical repair, stitching together blood vessels that are only 1-1.5mm wide and reconnecting everything.

Normally, removing a throat tumor means losing your voice box permanently.
You'd need a hole in your neck to breathe and would have to relearn how to speak and swallow.

But this dual-robot approach let surgeons work with precision that human hands just can't match. The patient was talking and eating normally right after surgery. Australia is the first country to have both these robot systems working together like this.

You’re probably thinking willy wonka 😂

But quick fact: chocolate quality is basically a lottery. Same farm, same beans, but one batch tastes amazing and the next tastes mediocre. Why? Because fermentation is totally random.

After cacao beans are harvested, they're piled up and natural bacteria and fungi from the environment break them down. This fermentation creates all the compounds that make chocolate taste like chocolate instead of bitter plant matter.

But farmers have zero control over which microbes show up or how the process goes.

University of Nottingham researchers figured out exactly which bacteria and fungi create the best flavors, then recreated this "perfect" microbial community in the lab.

They can now control temperature, pH, and microbial populations to get consistent, high-quality fermentation every time.

Soon we might just have a lot more good chocolate without that expensive price tag.

Perfect to go with some espresso :)

This sounds gross but hear me out, it's actually brilliant.

Every person produces enough nitrogen in their urine to fertilize a garden, but most of the world imports expensive fertilizers instead. Meanwhile, that nitrogen just gets flushed away or pollutes water sources.

Stanford researchers built a solar-powered system that extracts ammonia from urine and turns it into ammonium sulfate aka actual fertilizer. The system uses solar panels for electricity and captures their waste heat (about 80% of solar energy) to speed up the process.

Why I’m geeking out about it: the waste heat makes the ammonia separation faster while keeping the solar panels cooler, which makes them more efficient.

In places like Uganda where fertilizer is expensive, this system could generate over $4 per kilogram of nitrogen recovered. Plus it cleans the wastewater, making it safe to discharge or reuse for irrigation.

TLDR: We’re turning waste into resources while generating clean energy
I never thought I’d be fascinated to talk about pee x engineering..

Have you ever tried to figure out what's inside a wrapped present by shaking it?

That's basically what nuclear physicists have been doing with atomic nuclei for decades. Except the "present" is impossibly small and vibrating a trillion times per second.

Berkeley Lab just finished building GRETA (Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking Array) and it's about to change everything we know about the center of atoms.

Ultimate Nuclear Spy Camera

The problem that's been driving nuclear physicists crazy

We understand atoms well enough to build PET scans and nuclear power plants, but the nucleus (the dense core at the center) is still this chaotic mystery.

Current detectors can only catch fragments of what's happening.

It's like trying to understand a movie by seeing random 3-second clips. You can’t.

Scientists know there's incredible physics happening inside nuclei, but they've been working with partial information for decades.

How they built the ultimate nuclear spy camera

GRETA is essentially a perfect sphere made of 30 ultra-pure germanium detectors that surrounds whatever they want to study. Each detector has four crystal chunks about the size of coffee cups, cooled to -300°F. That's ten times colder than Antarctica, for reference.

Why so cold? At room temperature, these crystals buzz with noise like an old coffee machine. Cool them to nearly absolute zero, and they become completely silent, ready to detect the faintest gamma ray.

Here's how it works: researchers fire a particle beam at a target placed at the center of GRETA's sphere. This creates excited, unstable atoms that immediately start emitting gamma rays (high-energy light particles that carry information about what just happened inside the nucleus).

Instead of just detecting these gamma rays, GRETA tracks their exact 3D paths and energies as they shoot out in all directions. It's like having a perfect surround-sound system, but for nuclear physics.

The engineering that broke my mind

The technical achievement here is insane. GRETA processes over 500,000 gamma-ray interactions per second in real time. The germanium crystals are so specialized that only about four can be made per year worldwide.

The sphere is built in two halves that separate to allow target changes, then come back together aligned within one millionth of an inch. The electronics can handle 50,000 signals per second from each crystal, all while the whole system operates at near absolute zero temperature.

Why this actually matters

GRETA will study over 1,000 new isotopes that have never been observed before: atoms that exist for fractions of a second. These could explain why our universe is made of matter instead of antimatter.

But here's what gets me excited: GRETA is 10 to 100 times more sensitive than anything we've had before. It's like upgrading from a blurry security camera to 4K with zoom.

What they're about to discover

Scientists will use GRETA to explore "the drip lines" - the absolute limits of how many protons and neutrons a nucleus can hold before it falls apart. They'll study pear-shaped nuclei that violate fundamental symmetries in nature. They'll watch in real-time as unstable isotopes decay and transform.

Understanding nuclear structure better could improve fusion energy research, nuclear medicine, and our fundamental model of how matter works.

GRETA is heading to Michigan this summer, with first experiments in 2026. For the first time ever, we'll have a complete 360-degree view of nuclear interactions as they happen.

I have a feeling we're about to discover some things that will completely rewrite physics textbooks. And honestly?

Nobody knows what we're going to find.

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