Somehow I missed this when it first happened.

Spanish transport secretary resigns over trains designed too large for tunnels

New Civil Engineer | Feb. 23. 2023 | Ella Jessel

Heh!

Transport secretary Isabel Pardo de Vera and Isaías Táboas, the head of rail operator Renfe, have now quit their posts, bringing the number of people who have lost their jobs over the scandal to four.

The batch of 31 new trains was intended to upgrade the ageing rolling stock in the northern regions of Asturias and Cantabria and be in action by next year.

But the trains will now be delivered two years late after the size of the existing 19th century line gauge was incorrectly defined on the specification. The rolling stock has been designed to fit the specification for new infrastructure. The mistake meant the trains would not fit through some of the network’s existing tunnels.

Yet the Spanish Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Development has stressed that the mistake was spotted early and the trains had not yet been manufactured. “No public expenditure was made or incurred as a result of this situation,” it said.

The fiasco has caused a huge political storm and sent the project back to the drawing board.

… that sounds like a wee bit of ‘public expenditure made or incurred as a result of this situation,’ to me …

The head of the regional government of Cantabria, Miguel Angel Revilla, called it a “monumentally botched job”.

Renfe awarded the £227.5M contract to Spanish manufacturer CAF in June 2020, but a year later CAF realised that the dimensions it was provided for the trains were not correct and stopped building the trains.

Oh, and that … sounds like a second bit of public expenditure made or incurred as a result of this situation.

Scientists trapped antimatter particle for months — but studying it without blowing up lab was a challenge
NY Post | 10/25/2026 | Brandon Cruz

A team of physicists recently trapped a single antimatter particle for months — a delicate feat where one wrong move could’ve blown up their lab, according to new research.

Antimatter, which explodes when it comes into contact with the ordinary matter, was captured by researchers at Northwestern University and stored in a cold box where they used incredibly cold temps and magnets to suspend the particle in midair, according to findings published in the Physical Review Letters…

To keep it from touching anything, the team built a contraption called a “one-positron quantum cyclotron,” which uses near zero temperatures and invisible magnetic and electric forces to keep the particle floating in a vacuum, keeping it from ever touching a single wall.

The first-of-its-kind experiment put the particle into its lowest possible energy state, letting scientists control it with pinpoint precision for months without destroying it in order to study whether antimatter behaves differently than regular matter it mirrors.

The fearless physicists at Northwestern University, under the guidance of Gerald Gabrielse, first snagged the particle as it shot out of radioactive material, then froze it to just 0.3 degrees above absolute zero — negative 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.

All I want for Christmas is a One-Positron Quantum Cyclotron.

I could drop it in my car’s engine and see what happens.