After lightning struck and chipped Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue last week, repairs were required. In this AP photo, a worker is inspecting the statue’s outstretched arm for damage, with the goal of installing more protective lightning rods on the figure in the weeks to come. [AP/Felipe Dana via Hypervocal]
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These days, we tend to think of New York’s bridges as traffic obstacles. But at the turn of the last century, the bridges that sprang up in thickets around Manhattan’s shores were objects of wonder and civic pride—near magical pieces of infrastructure that took many years (and lives) to build.
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The London Array—the world’s largest offshore wind farm—started operating on April 8, 2013, about twenty kilometers (12 miles) off the coast of Kent and Essex, England. Looking at these pictures taken from space gives you a perfect idea of the Array’s amazingly vast extension.
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Airborne pollution is a major issue in China, with local hospitals opening up "smog clinics" and waves of city-dwellers migrating to more rural areas to escape. While Chinese officials are pursuing "cloud seeding" as a way to control pollution, a Zhejiang University professor thinks he has a better idea: Sprinklers. Big ones.
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For nearly a decade, China’s burgeoning steel industry has spit out more than ten times the steel of Japan, the world’s second largest producer. But that’s quickly changing: As demand slows and China attempts to curb pollution, a massive recession is hitting its steel country.
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On our way back from CES, Gizmodo took a detour into the desert to explore a particularly bizarre aspect of the region’s electrical infrastructure, the so-called Coyote Dry Lake Return Electrode.
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For the last four years, the Dredge Research Collaborative has been looking at dredging and erosion control as a form of often unacknowledged landscape architecture. Part of their work is a series of festivals they’re calling DredgeFest that celebrate and examine the role that dredging plays in landscaping. Their next event is in Louisiana. Gizmodo asked them to explain why.
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One of the ironies of CES, hosted here in Las Vegas, is that the largest and perhaps most spectacular gadget we could all be covering is nearly 80 years old, weighs 6.6 million tons, and supplies much of the electricity fueling the devices on display at the trade show.
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Now that we know it was an eight-inch steel pipe that brought the world’s largest-diameter tunneling machine to a halt
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The developed world has a love affair with refrigeration that spreads way beyond the domestic chiller: It’s the backbone of the world’s food supply industry, keeping food fresher for far longer than mother nature intended. But it could be about to ruin us.
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