Power plants (and other industrial settings) often need to cool water to control plant temperatures. This usually requires cooling towers like the iconic curved towers seen at nuclear power plants. Keep reading
Tag: engineering
Engineering Our Landfills
We create a lot of waste and, at least for now, much of that waste goes into landfills. Properly managing garbage requires much more than digging a hole in the Keep reading
Breaking Down a Water-Powered Timer
In his latest “cutaway” video, Steve Mould takes a look at how you can nest siphons to create a system that periodically flushes itself. This kind of water-powered timer is Keep reading
Saving Screens with Shear-Thinning Fluids
These days glass screens travel with us everywhere, and they can take some big hits on the way. Manufacturers have made tougher glass, but they continue to look for ways Keep reading
Liquid Metal Printing
Engineers have developed a new 3D-printing technique that uses molten aluminum to quickly manufacture large-scale parts. This Liquid Metal Printing method deposits the metal into a bed of tiny glass Keep reading
Capturing the Tides
Twice a day the tides rise and fall along coastlines. Increasingly, engineers are trying to harness these regular currents for clean energy. Tidal turbines spin during the fastest flows, turning Keep reading
Mitigating Urban Floods
For densely-populated urban areas, floods are one of the most damaging and expensive natural disasters. We can’t control the amount of rain that falls, so engineers need other ways to Keep reading
Fixing Reverse Osmosis
Desalination and water treatment plants both rely on reverse osmosis to generate clean water for human use. The standard theory behind reverse osmosis for the last half century suggested that Keep reading
Sandgrouse Soak in Water
Desert-dwelling sandgrouse resemble pigeons or doves, but they have a very different superpower: males can soak in and hold 25 milliliters of water in their feathers, which they carry tens Keep reading
Acoustic Cameras
Acoustic cameras use arrays of microphones to isolate where sounds are coming from. As Steve Mould shows in this video, they have some incredibly cool properties. They can show engineers Keep reading