Engineering the perfect sand castle is tricky even in ideal conditions. If you don’t get the sand to water ratio just right, your majestic creation will collapse and wash away. Unless you’re cool with cheating. In that case all you need is a jar of Brookstone’s magical Sand that’s always the perfect consistency.
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Forget bulging muscles or a toned set of abs. If you really want to impress everyone on the beach this summer, a stunning sand castle is the way to go. And if your sculpting skills max out at Play-Doh snakes, these architectural sand castle molds will let you re-build the most stunning structures from past empires, ready to be lost to time once again once the tide rolls in.
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There’s nothing more fascinating or TV special-worthy than twins separated at birth. Whether they’re reunited at 15 or 50 it’s safe to say that there’ll be some eerily similar food preferences and a whole lot of crying. But what about two chemically identical grains of silica that haven’t seen each other for more than 4.6 billion years? More »
Scientists and researchers continue to emulate animals when designing and building robots, since animals know what they are doing. For instance, if you want a robot that can crawl over sand really fast(Just because) you should check out sea turtles. And that’s just what Georgia Tech has done here.
Researchers Dan Goldman, Nicole Mazouchova and Paul Umbanhowar designed this robot to scamper across loose sand dunes, inspired by the motion of baby sea turtles. Their hypothesis was that key to the turtle’s surprisingly speedy movement is the way they flex their wrists. To test that theory, they designed FlipperBot.
Their experiments will help them learn how fins and flippers are used as arms and legs, and potentially improve robot mobility. Watch the video or read the paper for an explanation of the tech behind the robot.
[via Geekosystem]
Here’s a relatively useless yet undoubtedly impressive trick you can pull the next time you go to the beach: make a sand castle that’s so unbelievably sturdy that it can hold up an entire person. Seriously. What’s it take? Unfortunately, a wee bit more than just wet sand. More »
Remember all the hard work you put into sand castles as a little kid? Crouching, scooping and shaping. It was tough! And it was always for naught because the stupid ocean would eventually swallow your castles whole and wash it away. What if you could make sand castles live forever, though? Turns out you can. More »
Given that sand finds its way into every nook and cranny of your person when you go for a swim, the prospect of dining on the beach is even less appealing. So what possessed artist Victor Castanera to create a series of plaster-based dinnerware cast from the natural contours of a sandy beach? More »
Any beach goer knows that spending time in the sand means spending infinitely more time trying to scrub sand off your body. Sand just sticks everywhere. But why doesn’t it stick to Olympic volleyball players? It’s because the Olympics always use special, highly regulated sand. More »
Envious of your pet hermit crabs’ 3D-printed domicile? Maybe you should cast your green eyes upon the Stone Spray project, an Eco-friendly robot printer that’s exploring the viability of soil as a building material. Although making actual buildings is a bit out of the robot’s reach, its team has managed to print a series of scaled sculptures (such as stools, pillars and load-bearing arc structures) out of sand, soil and a special solidification compound. The machine’s jet-spray nozzle seems to have an easier time constructing objects over per-existing scaffolding, but the team is striving to design structures that don’t require the extra support. “We want to push further the boundaries of digital manufacturing and explore the possibilities of an on-site fabrication machine,” the team writes on the project’s homepage, citing makeshift printed bridges or an on-beach canopy as possible applications of technology. If the Earth itself doesn’t make a green enough building material, consider this: the Stone Spray robot can be powered by solar energy alone. Check it out in all of its sand-sculpting glory in the video below.
Continue reading Stone Spray research project wants to print bridges with sand, solar power
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Stone Spray research project wants to print bridges with sand, solar power originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Aug 2012 23:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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