Self-assembling Carbon Nanoyarn

The approach used by NIF here to draw carbon nanotubes together is borderline artisanal. The end result is a micro-scale thread with incredible tensile strength, developed to replace the spider silk previously being used to suspend fuel capsules for nuclear fusion.

Enea Tree Museum

Situated on parkland near the shores of Lake Zurich, the Enea Baummuseum is an outdoor museum in Switzerland where trees are the art.

Created by Enzo Enea and his team at the Swiss architectural firm, Enea.

Tea Time

A tea infuser inspired by the shape of a pocket watch, the T-Timepiece was created by Dutch designer, Titus Wybenga.

Diamond Materials GmbH

A German-based CVD diamond specialist. Already mass producing diamond lenses at the scale of the cyclops lens found on every modern Rolex Datejust, scaled up, their diamond lenses would make for sensible successor to the now ubiquitous sapphire crystals used across the watch industry.

Diamond Materials played a crucial role in developing the diamond spheres used in the successful fusion energy experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility in December of 2022.

Inside Mondaine

A peek inside the manufacturing facilities of The Mondaine Group in Switzerland.

Pure Structural Colour

Tomas Weber reporting for Smithsonian Magazine, in an interview with researcher and inventor, Andrew Parker:

“The brightest colors are being produced from completely transparent materials."

Parker is also the cofounder of Lifescaped, creators of some of the most advanced biomimetic colours on the planet.

I imagine it won't be long before we start seeing applications of this technology being applied to watch dials.

"Perfection Is Really Hard"

Michael Stadermann speaking to the press at last week's announcement of the fusion energy breakthrough achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The level of penultimate-perfection that Stadermann and his colleagues achieve with each spherical diamond fuel capsule that they deliver is mind bending. A hollow shell crafted from the hardest material known to humankind, measuring two millimeters in diameter, near perfectly round, and polished 100x smoother than the surface of a mirror, filled with fuel through a tube that is a mere 2 microns wide.

Somewhat heartening for Stadermann and his team, I'm sure, is that the weight of future progress in this particular branch of fusion technology does not lie squarely on their shoulders. Encouragingly, the system design iterations and laser upgrades detailed by Annie Kritcher and Jean-Michel Di Nicola, to improve the symmetry of the implosion, made this milestone achievement in December of 2022 possible with a fuel capsule that had more tungsten inclusions—and was therefore less perfect—than the fuel capsule produced for the fusion trial in August of 2021.

Rolex's UHP Tank

James Stacey dives deep into the subterranean laboratories at Rolex to provide an inside look at the lengths that the brand went to to adapt its Superlative Chronometer tests to its leviathan-sized Deepsea Challenge—including an Ultra High Pressure tank developed in partnership with COMEX.

The Deepsea Challenge is tested, in land-locked Switzerland, to a level of water pressure that doesn't naturally exist anywhere on earth.

Fusion

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced that its facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have successfully achieved fusion ignition. An impressive and necessary milestone on the path to near-limitless clean energy.

Rubattel & Weyermann

A dial-making specialist owned by The Swatch Group.