Engineering in the News: 9 November 2026

How to run it in 10 minutes

• 0 to 1 minute: title slide. Three real engineering stories from the past week.
• 1 to 6 minutes: one story slide each, about 90 seconds per story. Read the three lines, then ask a student to explain the science card in their own words.
• 6 to 8 minutes: five-minute debate, cut down. Pick one statement and give each side 30 seconds.
• 8 to 10 minutes: two-minute challenge on the 66,000-volt cable. Reveal the answer card at the end.

What happened

1. All 95 subsea cables laid at East Anglia THREE

Seaway7 has laid all 95 inner-array cables at the 1.4GW East Anglia THREE wind farm, about 69km off the Suffolk coast. More than 240km of 66kV cable links 95 Siemens Gamesa turbines of 14.7MW each to the offshore substation. Read the story.

Science link: GCSE and A-level Physics, electricity. P = VI and P = I²R: doubling the voltage halves the current and cuts heat loss to a quarter.
Jobs behind the story: electrical engineers, offshore wind technicians.

2. Bristol students design their own computer chips

More than 50 University of Bristol students designed their own chips in a single workshop run by student start-up Vulkos with the Bristol Electrical and Electronic Engineering Society. Its browser tools had them designing within five minutes, compared with up to nine months to set up professional tools in a university lab. Read the story.

Science link: GCSE Computer Science, computer systems. Binary and logic gates: a 640 × 480 screen at 60 frames a second means 18,432,000 pixel decisions every second, about 54 nanoseconds each.
Jobs behind the story: electronic engineers, silicon design engineers.

3. Who really invented AI?

AI was built step by step by many engineers over nearly 70 years. In 1958 Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron taught itself to sort cards after 50 trials, and in 2012 AlexNet was trained on a computer with two graphics cards in a Toronto bedroom. Read the story.

Science link: GCSE and A-level Computer Science, algorithms and data. A learning algorithm guesses, measures its error and adjusts its connections to reduce it.
Jobs behind the story: machine learning engineers, hardware engineers.

Debate statements

1. Running power cables at a higher voltage is always the better engineering choice.
   For: it halves the current, quarters the heat loss and means fewer cables. Against: higher voltage needs thicker insulation, costlier equipment and stricter safety, so the best choice is a trade-off.
2. Every student should design a computer chip before they leave school.
   For: browser tools now make it possible in minutes and it shows how every device works. Against: curriculum time is limited and not every student needs hardware skills.
3. The engineer who makes an idea work deserves more credit than the person who had the idea.
   For: ideas are cheap until someone builds them, as the AlexNet story shows. Against: without the idea there is nothing to build, and progress needs both.

Two-minute challenge: the 66,000-volt cable

A turbine sends 14.7MW down a cable. Older designs used 33kV; East Anglia THREE uses 66kV.

1. Use P = VI: for the same power, doubling V halves I. The current halves.
2. Heat lost in the cable is P = I²R. With the current halved, (½)² = ¼. Heat loss falls to a quarter.
3. Across 95 turbines that means less wasted energy, cooler cables and more turbines on each cable string, so fewer cables and less seabed work.

A-level extension: for three-phase AC, I = P ÷ (√3 × V) = 14,700,000 ÷ (1.732 × 66,000) ≈ 129 A per turbine.

More stories: borntoengineer.com/stem-news