lepton

Rare earth magnets sit inside nearly every electric motor, but 90% of the material is conventionally thrown away. Mass Magnetics (S26) is recycling magnets from EV motors into new ones for robotics and defense, avoiding much of the capital-intensive refining required by mining.

I want to buy american so badly it hurts. But some of y'all make this shit as hard as fk.

glorifying long hours like this is dangerous. everywhere i’ve been, we’ve rightfully had hard restrictions on what you were allowed to do based on your shift length you’re allowed nowhere near a mill or welder after hour sixteen on your shift

If you find this, stop, call fire department. This is filled with nasty ancient fire extinguisher that could absolutely F YOU UP.

there’s a 59-year-old, family-owned Michigan machine shop that’s about to go under. 156 jobs, 152k sq ft of turning, broaching, heat treat, grinding and electroplating capacity they lost a big contract after investing in a new line someone should buy it. I suspect nobody will:

why when men go out they dress like mechanics lol

(1/6) From @GoogleDeepmind’s AlphaGo to AlphaZero, we saw machines find moves that reached beyond what we’d imagined for them. No one taught them those strategies. They emerged from reinforcement learning: playing, failing, and trying again under a single binary task reward for success or failure. Inspired by them, we couldn’t help but wonder: what might a robot discover if we gave it that same freedom to learn? That question led us to AlphaNIST. Starting tabula rasa, with that same binary reward plus only a simple control cost, a single policy solves all 20 @NIST assembly tasks at a 98.2% success rate in simulation. More surprising still, AlphaNIST can complete 10 different tasks in a row, receiving that reward only once, after all 10 are done. Just as AlphaGo’s strategies surprised its creators, AlphaNIST discovered dexterous strategies we couldn’t have come up with ourselves. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2610.13354 Website: alpha-nist.github.io

JUST IN: Ultra raised $50M to rent AI robots to warehouses instead of selling them. Its robots pack, sort, and prepare orders while warehouses pay a monthly fee to use them. -500K+ orders packed -$62M raised to date -Can work up to 24 hours a day -Installed and working within hours -AI powered by @physical_int It feels like robotics is starting to look a lot more like cloud computing.

Every AI data center needs power, and every power plant needs a step-up transformer to connect to the grid. If you ordered one in 2021, it arrived in under 500 days. Today it takes more than 1,120 days. A large transformer core is made of grain-oriented electrical steel that spends about five days in a 1,200°C annealing furnace. Only one US company makes that steel: Cleveland-Cliffs. Inside a bell annealing furnace, coils of iron with about 3% silicon stand on end in hydrogen while the furnace heats them about 15 to 20°C an hour. It takes two to three days to reach 1,200°C. As the coils heat up, tiny particles that pin the grains in place slowly dissolve, and about one grain in a million starts growing and swallows its neighbors. Then the coils sit at 1,200°C for 20 to 40 hours. Grains that started 0.01 mm across end up 10 mm wide, nearly all pointing the same way. That alignment cuts the power a transformer core loses as heat. Cleveland-Cliffs can supply about 12 to 20% of what the US needs, by DOE's estimate. China was in a similar spot before 2000: its only volume producer covered 30% of demand. The few foreign companies that could make the high-grade version refused to license their process. Baosteel spent ten years on research and made its first good coil in 2008. By 2013 it could make 300,000 tons a year, three times what all of China made before 2000. I build chemical plants. If you're in hard-tech, chances are you are now competing with AI data centers for the same grid equipment.

SF is about sending emails as much as you fucking can until you die

Alright so this is insane

World's first amateur turbopumped engine tested by OpenTurbopumps.