Six Science posts #85

Uranus's new moon is no joke, self driving safety and more

Author

Harshal Chhaya
August 24, 2025

Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.

I scroll so you don’t have to.

Got some great feedback about the special lightweight issue on Helium last week. Thanks! Keep it coming!

Also, I love that folks with large audiences - like Google with its Google doodle and Microsoft with it’s search bar - are promoting curiosity and interest in our wider world.

Stay curious, friend!

#1 🤯 

“with 57M miles of data, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 85% less serious injuries & 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers. 2.4 million are injured & 40k killed in US accidents a year”

What do you think? Will algorithm-assisted driving become mandatory soon? Like airbags did?

#2 🤯 

😃 

#3 🤯 

Uranus's new moon is no joke

Also, I love that all the moons of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters.

#4 🤯 

#5 🤯 

You may think you know Marie Curie but I bet you didn’t know this part

To help the wounded in WW I, she proposed “mobile X-ray units” which could be used in battle-front hospitals to diagnose the wounded before treatment.

These mobile radiography units, known as “Little Curies,” treated an estimated one million soldiers.

She drove the trucks herself and recruited her daughter (a future Nobel prize winner herself) to help.

Read more at: https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/12/14/marie-curie-ambulance-little-curies/

#6 🤯 

Electrical engineering jokes never get old. They are always current. 🤣 

This is issue #85.

Let’s see what makes 85 an interesting number:

  • the product of two prime numbers (5 and 17), and is therefore a semiprime of the form (5.q) where q is prime.

  • together with 86 and 87, forms the second cluster of three consecutive semiprimes; the first comprising 33, 34, 35.

  • the smallest number that can be expressed as a sum of two squares, with all squares greater than 1, in two ways, 85 = 92 + 22 = 72 + 62

  • 85 is the hypotenuse of two different Pythogorean triangles: (13, 84, 85) and (36, 77, 85)

  • Astatine is a chemical element; it has symbol At and atomic number 85. It is the rarest naturally occurring element in the Earth's crust, occurring only as the decay product of various heavier elements. All of astatine's isotopes are short-lived; the most stable is astatine-210, with a half-life of 8.1 hours. Consequently, a solid sample of the element has never been seen, because any macroscopic specimen would be immediately vaporized by the heat of its radioactivity.

    • Astatine is likely to have a dark or lustrous appearance and may be a semiconductor or possibly a metal

      (I find it really interesting that after decades of research, scientists know so little about this element)

  • There is no country that uses 85 for their country calling code.

About

This newsletter is my way of sharing interesting science-related news with my curious friends. I enjoy finding science and math connections in our world.

Please share this newsletter with others. Let’s encourage curiosity.

- Harshal (@hschhaya on X/Twitter)

That’s it for this issue.

Hit ‘reply’ to tell me what you think.

And hit ‘forward’ to share with your friends and family.

Let’s all celebrate science and engineering and curiosity.

Best wishes,

Harshal

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