Tag: engineering

The World

Printing a village, one house at a time 🏡🏠🏡

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If you had told me a few years ago that homes would be “printed” at all, much less a full village of them down in Mexico, I would have laughed. But here it is, the strange and sometimes beautiful world of tomorrow.

Sure, these “printed” homes are IKEA-showroom-small at 500 square feet. But they are real homes – and real stylish, with interestingly rounded corners and a traditional terracotta look. These homes are not chintzy at all. They have already survived a magnitude 7.4 earthquake.

The houses are made with a a Vulcan II printer, developed by an Austin-based construction technology company. The building material is called “lavacrete”. The process is controlled by a smartphone. Three people can build a house in less than a day.

When it’s time for me to really downsize and move to Mexico, I want one of these.

The World

“Skycrane maneuver has started…”

patmcg3 Comments

We Earthlings have a history of fearing Martians invading our planet 👽, so it’s always amusing to watch a video of us invading them. 🧑🏻‍🚀

I used to be obsessed with 7 Minutes of Terror: Curiosity Rover’s Risky Mars Landing, which shows how NASA gets a rover from hurtling 10,000 mph through space to softly kissing the surface of Mars — all within a few short minutes. It’s still an amazing video if you haven’t seen it and are interested in, well… anything cool.

My favorite part is the skycrane maneuver, which is hard to explain but looks insane. And it seems to work quite well.

“If you’re landing a rover on Mars, there’s no doubt this is the right way.”

In fact, this skycrane show-off maneuver works so well that NASA keeps doing it. Check out a video of the latest invasion — I mean landing — in the name of Perseverance.