The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire, in 1969. Randy Newman wrote a song about that. This week, in London, UK, things in a neighborhood in London are burning, the heat being supplied by a new, tall building that—for lengthy periods of the day during at least part of the year— focuses sunlight down […]
Tag: building
How to disassemble a skyscraper, chapter 2
There’s a new state of the art of disassembling — rather than “simply” dynamiting — a building tall enough to be called a skyscraper. The old, albeit seldom-if-ever-used method is shown and described in David MaCauley’s book Unbuilding. We described it here not so long ago. The new approach is a more mechanized version of […]
Earthquake-activated house-levitating pneumatic system
The Air Danshin Systems company of Japan says it offers pneumatic technology to protect buildings in the event of an earthquake. The shaking triggers a stream of air that levitates the house. The diagram below, from the company, shows to some extent how the system works, with blue representing the stream of air. (The Spoon & Tamago blog […]
Bacterial Builders, Inspired by Ancient Pyramids
The title of this study speaks volumes (albeit a bit cryptically): “A robotic micro-assembly process inspired by the construction of the ancient pyramids and relying on several thousand flagellated bacteria acting as micro-workers,” S. Martel and M. Mohammadi, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2009, IROS 2009. 10-15 Oct. 10-15,2009, pp. 426-7. (Thanks […]
