A huge pyramid in the middle of nowhere tracking the end of the world on radar. An abstract geometric shape beneath the sky without a human being in sight. It could be the opening scene of an apocalyptic science fiction film, but it’s just the U.S. military going about its business, building vast and other-worldly architectural structures that the civilian world only rarely sees.
French engineers have been experimenting with a technique that could redirect seismic energy away from structures such as cities, dams, and nuclear power plants, sparing them from damage. It involves digging large, cylindrical boreholes into the ground, forming a defensive geometry of lace-like arrays that, researchers hope, could deflect seismic waves and thus make whole landscapes "invisible" to earthquakes.
These optical targets in the Arizona desert were built for calibrating the cameras of a spy satellite network called the Corona program. Similar to the huge bar codes found across the U.S. southwest, also used for testing high-altitude cameras, these targets are glyphs meant to be seen from the sky: fixed points of focus and orientation for classified machines soaring through space far above.
It has been nearly a month since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar, and its ultimate whereabouts remain unclear. The complex international effort of searching for the plane in a remote stretch of the South Indian Ocean raises the question of what would happen if a plane were to go down in the Arctic: who would coordinate the necessary search and rescue teams, and where should they be based? Geographer Mia Bennett tried to answer this question on her blog, Cryopolitics.
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Matthew Shaw and William Trossell, the London-based duo known as ScanLAB Projects, continue to push the envelope of laser-scanning technology, producing visually stunning and conceptually intricate work that falls somewhere between art and practical surveying.
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Fryer oil turns plain old potatoes into delicious french fries. It powers our biodiesel cars. And, now, it’s being used to turn the dusty surfaces of rural Canadian roads into stable makeshift asphalt—AND THEY SMELL LIKE FRENCH FRIES. God bless our obsession with that infernally unhealthy liquid.
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California’s chief snow surveyor ventured into the Sierras this week to see how much water the state can expect from the spring melt—and he came back with very bad news. The devastating drought that the state’s been dealing with the past few months will continue to devastate for the foreseeable future.
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Underground, where this is no GPS and certainly no Wi-Fi, mapping caves requires a different kind of technical ingenuity. Thus, there is cave radio. To learn about the DIY world of cave radio and underground exploration, Gizmodo picked the brain of Stanley Sides, tinkerer and former president of the Cave Research Foundation.
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The vast and looping knots of L.A.’s elaborate freeway system have long inspired an unlikely stew made from equal parts road rage, suffocating air pollution, and an unexpected aesthetic appreciation for their stacked coils and crisp lines. A drivable geometry textbook, the freeways are perhaps the city’s real monuments, Stonehenge-like megastructures that novelist J.G. Ballard would call "motion sculptures in space," abstract works of automotive art too easy to miss for all the oil stains and honking.
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A week of calamity in landscapes reads! Did microbes cause the largest mass extinction in earth’s history? Why is California sinking? What did we learn from the biggest earthquake in America fifty years ago? And, closer to home, how dangerous should a playground be?
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
