Highlights this week: 🧠 Controlling voltage with your mind 🎣 multi-millennium fluorocarbon memory 🪡 and the thinnest sewing needle in history.
🎤 Featured Interview: Phillip Gulley and Matthew Haber of Cofactr discuss de-risking electronics supply chains.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: A rechargeable battery made from food.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- With the power of your thoughts alone, you can control the voltage in up to 30% of your body's cells. Modulating the endogenous voltage of cells can be used to instruct cell behavior including tissue regeneration.
- Open Circuits is a coffee table photo book with interesting cross sections of many electronic components. RF components and cables are especially interesting, since conductor geometry is so important to their design.
- A GitHub user has started denting fluorocarbon fishing wire to encode binary data for long term storage (1,000+ years). So far, fine for writing, not so great for reading.
- One of the smallest needles ever made is from Neuralink at just 0.024mm (6x smaller than an acupuncture needle!). 3D microscope video of different needle sizes between acupuncture (smallest at 0.16mm), insulin (bigger), and syringe (biggest at 0.6mm).
- Part 1 of a 6-part YouTube series focused around the popular indie game, Shenzhen I/O. The videos cover designing a custom printed circuit board, firmware, and a mechanical enclosure to replicate the first puzzle in the game – the "Fake Security Camera".
- With the right design, the copper resistance of the etched foil in a PCB can be used to create simple planar (even flexible) heaters. You can even avoid doing the layout with online tools like this one that can generate designs in a variety of form factors.
- Another incredible EMI visualization in Blender (do not run high-speed signal lines underneath a stainless-steel stiffener) this time using results from Ansys HFSS.
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Investment in defense tech is on track to surge to nearly $185 billion by 2027 – as seen with companies like Shield AI, Galvanick, and countless others. Renewable energy and biotech ranked as the top defense tech segments by deal flow in 2022. Download Pitchbook’s 2023 defense tech report.
- Plantd, a North Carolina based maker of carbon negative structural panels completed a Series A and several pilots earlier this year. From Countdown Capital.
- Matic raised a $29.5M Series A for its consumer vacuum which uses more advanced sensors and autonomous navigation to continuously adapt to users cleaning needs.
- Orangewood Labs has raised $4.5 million in the company's first venture round. Their flagship product, RoboGPT, allows users to purchase robotic arms through a subscription model and program them via a chat interface. 7pc, KSK, VentureSouq all invested.
One Interesting Picture 📸: Andrew McCarthy captured an incredible shot of the ISS near to the moon.
