construction

15 Photographs Of The Superstructures That Put Us In Space

“It is easy to invent a flying machine,” said the 19th-century aviation engineer Otto Lilienthalmore, “[and] difficult to build one; to make it fly is everything.” The challenge of air (and later, space) travel began not with building aircraft, but with building a realistic simulation machine in which to test those aircraft.


There’s 320 Tons Of Junk In The Trunk Of This Russian Dumper

With 11 open-pit facilities producing over 45 million tonnes of coal annually, the Kuzbassrazrezugol (KRU) mining company isn’t just the biggest company in the Russian Federation, it’s the single largest coal exporter on the planet. And to empty its Bachatsky open-pit coal mine — one of the largest such mines in the region, producing 8.7 million tonnes annually — as efficiently as possible, KRU relies on the world’s largest dump truck: the Belaz series 7560.


Custom 3D-Printed Beams Can Be 10,000 Times Stronger Than Steel

Steel beams are pretty uniformly strong, but they’re all run of the mill, literally. If you start 3D-printing custom beams for the exact purpose they’re intended to serve though, you’ve got a regular space-age material on your hands. It’s lighter than steel and orders of magnitude stronger.


Are Blood Bricks The Future Of Building?

Take the blood of a freshly slaughtered animal. Mix thoroughly with preservatives and sand, pour into square moulds, and bake for one hour. Allow to cool — then build your home from the result. No, really.


This Sweating Rooftop Sounds Like A Terrible Idea

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich has developed a rooftop mat made of a 5mm-thick polymer that can absorb water when it rains. The idea is to cool the interior with less reliance on air conditioning. It’s hard to imagine how this is possibly going to work.


Monster Machines: The 71m Tall, 4600-Tonne Crane That Builds Aircraft Carriers

Aircraft carriers are, how to say, big. Building them is a lot easier if you have a really, really big crane. Meet Big Blue. She’s the largest crane in the western hemisphere, and she’s hard at work piecing together the new Ford-class aircraft carriers in Newport News, Virginia.


Construction Worker Impaled Through The Brain Is A Modern-Day Phineas Gauge

If you’ve ever taken a psychology course, you’ll have heard of Phineas Gage, the man who survived having a railroad tie driven through his skull. It sounds like a one-of-a-kind thing, but a Brazilian construction worker just survived a similar injury.


3D Printer Can Build You A House In 20 Hours: Welcome To The Future

We’ve seen 3D printers used for everything from iPhone cases to makeshift weapons, but if you think bigger, what can these new printers really be used for? Could you really make your own house with a 3D printer in less than 20 hours? Turns out you can, and the technology is now set to be used by NASA for a future Moon colony.


Are You Impressed By This Publicity Stunt?

A German heavy equipment manufacturer decided it would try to impress potential buyers — or maybe just people with a fetish for construction equipment — by using a series of massive cranes to lift each other.


The Mesmerising Effect Of Destruction In Reverse

It may be the oldest trick in the book, but there’s something about this backwards destruction video that mesmerises me. Perhaps it’s the editing combined with the music. Maybe the slow-motion filming.


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