Articles tagged "the-art-and-science-of-building"

You can almost hear the lowly mules--both of whom fled the scene--cry out in that sort of self-deprecating _God damnit_ that only comes when you know you really fucked up.

This vid was presented earlier this month at the latest International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Vilamoura, Algarve in Portugal by Rehan O'Grady, and Marco Dorigo, from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universit…

In May of last year, an earthquake in the southeast of Spain violently shook the region. In the aftermath of the event, which registered a 5.1 on the Richter scale, nine people died and dozens of others were injured. The event caught many residents o…

Move over, McMansions. In the not-so-distant future, your studio apartment will also be your gym, your massive dining room, your home office, a yoga studio, house a guest room and function as pretty much any other kind of space you could imagine.

Remember _The Hunt for the Red October_, that terrific movie from the 1990s starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery running around on submarines? The Red October was this new Soviet super sub that was virtually undetectable by radar and rigged up with…

A study published last week in "the journal":http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/11/1211658109 of the National Academy of Sciences forecasts massive global urbanization between now and 2030. Researchers estimate total expansion of the planet's

Perhaps chalk it up to lack of caffeine, but I've spent a cool 30 minutes here trying to think of a good metaphor or statistic that might point to how insanely complex weather on Earth is -- the near-infinitely vast number of variables and interactio…

*With an update* Now that Apple is putting the finishing touches on the most anticipated smartphone in history, Chinese students are again being pressed into service on the factory line inside the single largest internship program in the world.

_"The computer [is] the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it is an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it the wheel is a mere hula-hoop."_ -- Marshall McLuhan, from War and Peace in the Global Village_ Last month,…

Here's a thing I became mildly obsessed with this weekend (thanks to the "new issue"http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Biomimicry-is-Inspiring-Human-Innovation-165592706.html of _Smithsonian_): "tunnel boom." Tunnel boom is a common phe…

Prostheses are a lot of things — practical, functional, useful — but pretty they are not. Your standard prosthetic leg is typically nothing more than flesh-colored hunk of plastic designed, if anything, to be ignored or overlooked. But a handful of v…

Salvador Dali's career has, over the years, slowly been distilled into posters of melting junk that inspire millions of _whooooaaaaas_ in dorm rooms everywhere, but his surrealist work wasn't limited to the canvas. In fact, he designed an entire pavi…

The 1968 Summer Games were held in Mexico City, but they still changed Detroit. In search of Olympic ephemera, I recently came across a video in the "Prelinger Archives":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/7/31/the-fine-art-of-keeping-the-world-s-we…

On its opening day in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge bore no protective barrier beyond railings. "This bridge needs neither praise, eulogy nor encomium," boomed engineer J. Strauss, who designed the bridge. "It speaks for itself. We who have labored lo…

The best reason to pay attention to the Apple-Samsung patent battle has nothing to do with patents or battle, really. To prove how they worked for years to develop products that Samsung simply copied, Apple is sending in its most senior designers to

New York’s 2012 Olympic Games kicked off with a series of runners hoisting the flaming torch high above their heads, pursued by excited New Yorkers, surrounded by spectators and a police escort with horses, limned by hot-dog vendors and honking cabs…

I have a friend who remembers flying the British Airways route to from New York to London. He recalled that it was a really noisy plane and the crew would hand out headphones circa WWII (But has this really improved?). There were four channels of mus…

Within the world of promotional military videos, strategies don't differ much from selling women's cosmetics. Promoting youthful fun through products that are "designed to solve disappointments":http://science.jrank.org/pages/11645/Women-Femininity-i…

Have you heard of the "Superbus":http://www.superbusproject.com/? You could have already, as it has been in prototype production for years, and has recently been gaining more attention at auto shows and through "public demonstrations":http://www.yout…

Today may or may not be the start of a new era in Mexico. It all depends on who you ask. For those who cast votes in yesterday's presidential elections for either the Democratic Revolution or National Action Parties, Mexico is in regress. Their r…

Public parks don't tend to be cash cows, not unless they get "advertising":http://reason.com/blog/2012/05/11/has-gov-rick-scott-ruined-floridas-parks or become, well, private. But the park that sits on top of the old Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Is…

Today, Antoni Gaudi, father of modern Catalan architecture would be 160. Creator of Spain's most legit, most Toon Town in-real-life designs, was the same man who appeared as not-worth-taking-to-the-hospital when he walked across a busy street in 1926…

I don't live in New York City, but I love its bridges. I love the combination of babies in strollers on the pedestrian walkway of the Manhattan Bridge with brutal engineering and subway trains. I like that on the bridges you're touching a big empty e…