When complete, the Vestas V164 is slated to be the world’s largest and most powerful wind turbine on the planet. Standing 443 feet tall, with a diameter spanning 538 feet, the turbine to generates eight megawatts of power. This is no child’s pinwheel. In fact, it cranks out enough juice to power a whole neighborhood. More »
The 13,000 square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone is home to the Green Bank Telescope. The 2-acre, 16-million pound dish is the largest, fully steerable radio telescope in the world. And, as this gorgeous video by Motherboard highlights, it might be in danger. More »
The Qatalum smelter in Qatar is the largest, highest output aluminum smelter in the world. With a mind-boggling 704 individual smelting pots, it produces upwards of 585,000 tons of aluminum each year. That’s a lot of Coke cans. More »
It usually takes a pretty hefty tool to knock out a brick wall, demolish a concrete staircase, or pulverize a tile shower stall during a bathroom renovation. It’s a job for the pounding chisel tip of a demolition hammer or a jackhammer—a tool big enough to require its operator, as The Far Side once suggested, to “let the belly do the work.” More »
Aircraft carriers are, how to say, big. Building them is a lot easier if you have a really, really big crane. Meet Big Blue. She’s the largest crane in the western hemisphere, and she’s hard at work piecing together the new Ford-class aircraft carriers in Newport News, Virginia. More »
Over a span of two weeks in October, the Mira supercomputer will crank away nonstop, processing quadrillions of operations every second—something that few other machines are currently capable of. It will simultaneously track trillions of particles as they move, expand, and react to each other according to the laws of physics. This simulation will have to use everything mankind has learned about the movement of objects. If successful, it will not only confirm what we’ve suspected, but will also give us a deeper understanding of how the cosmos came to be. Mira, in short, is simulating the history of our universe. More »
Getting old isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, you get a hefty discount at the Country Kitchen Buffet. But you also suffer from stuff like age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a retinal disease that afflicts more than 10 million people a year in the US alone. There’s hope for the eyes of America’s elderly, though: A new pea-sized ocular implant can restore vision to the those who have lost it. More »
What’s the difference between a tuna fish and an unmanned underwater vehicle? About a million years of purpose-built evolution. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security is hoping to leverage Mother Nature’s handiwork into a fleet of ichthyoid-inspired drones to defend our harbors. More »
The innumerable caves, crags, and hiding spots dotting the Afghan mountains render conventional tactics useless. So rather than play reactionary whack-a-mole with insurgents, our Special Forces may soon deploy these radio-controlled, explosive-laden planes to find and eliminate targets in one deadly fell swoop. More »
Europe will receive nearly infallible weather data thanks to this trio of school bus-sized spacecraft, and the EU saves £4.5 billion in weather-related damage annually. This is what the atmosphere will look like in HD. More »
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