Category: Tech

I remind you that I have a group called Engineering Zen on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, there have been posts about:

– How for half a century science condescendingly explained to grandmothers that colds are caused by viruses, not drafts, — and in 2022, it found a mechanism by which grandmothers were partly right.

– People who are currently walking around with plutonium in their chests. Legally, registered with the nuclear regulator, with the instruction “to be returned to the state after death.” The capsule was seriously tested: cremation, plane crash, shotgun blast. It wasn’t radiation that killed the technology.

– Old sailors who poured oil overboard during storms. Not superstition, but working physics — and from it emerged, it seems, the first measurement of the size of a molecule in history. A teaspoon of oil, a pond under London, and Benjamin Franklin. Today, the same effect captures oil spills from satellites.

– Why almost all blue in the animal world is a deception: there’s no pigment at all. Neither in the wings of the morpho butterfly, nor in the feathers of a peacock, nor in your blue eyes. Mammals do not have any blue pigment. But it’s the opposite in plants.

– How the ocean floor is mapped… by looking at its surface from space. Underwater mountains betray themselves through “bumps” on the water — it turns out the sea is not flat at all. Only about a quarter of the sea floor has been measured with a sonar to this day.

– The MRI magnet, which is turned on only once in a lifetime — and then it circles current through a ring for years, without any socket. Even at night, when the clinic is closed. But if the cooling fails — a “quench” occurs, and tons of helium burst out through the pipe to the roof within seconds.

– The theorem by which a sphere can be cut into pieces and assembled into two identical spheres. Not a trick or sophistry — honest mathematics. The catch is that these “pieces” have no volume. At all. Like the coast of Britain has no length.

– Why in a language with three words for colors, the third is always red, and blue appears last. No need to know the language — just count. And why the go signal on Japanese traffic lights is legally “blue.”

– A rescue operation going on in space right now: a robot trying to catch a falling telescope, which has neither handles nor a docking unit — it was built in an era when no one thought of such things. Racing against the atmosphere.

– Lunar dust — the main nightmare of lunar bases. Microscopic sharp glass shards that eat away space suits within hours, stick to everything due to static, and — surprisingly — smell like gunpowder.

– A hypothesis that lasted 85 years and fell during the World Cup final — from a single line on Twitter. A counterexample is verified by a student in a minute, and it’s unclear why it wasn’t found earlier.

– The illusion of “stopped clocks,” which everyone has experienced: you shift your gaze to the second hand — and it has stopped. It turns out, the brain blinds you several times a second — and then edits time retrospectively.

– Ice that does not melt at +300°C — found trapped inside diamonds from the Earth’s mantle. And its even more strange black superheated relative seems to make up the interiors of Uranus and Neptune.

– Why the ads on the stadium boards, which you see on television, physically do not exist — viewers in Brazil, Germany, and Japan see three different sponsors at the same moment.

– A piece of wire mesh that tames fire where it is bound to explode — and on which the entire century of mining labor stood. The inventor gave it to the world for free.

– And for dessert — why a giant NASA rocket is transported not on asphalt, but on river pebbles. They tried asphalt — it went “in waves, like the sea.” Personally verified, I spent an hour looking at that gravel out the window.

Join us to not miss much more interesting stuff.

Engineering Zen

P.S. There is also a group in Telegram with the same name, but there the audience has stopped growing at all and stands at about 100 people, and until I figure out how to manage this, I am temporarily giving up on it.