research
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Researchers Made 25-Ton Boulders They Can Move By Hand, Giving More Insights Into Ancient Engineering
How were giant ancient structures like Stonehenge, or the towering Moai heads on Easter Island, assembled at a time when cranes and trucks were still hundreds of years away? Researchers at MIT have given more credence to theories that ancient engineers were masters of balance and leverage with a new experiment that produced giant concrete…
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The First Machine-Generated Book By A Scholarly Publisher Is A Boring Read
Amazon’s online book store is plagued with thousands of auto-generated ebooks crudely hacked together from other texts by shady authors” looking to make a quick buck. Most are unreadable, but it’s not always going to be that way. Springer Nature, a publisher serving the research community, just published its first book that was generated by…
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A Blast Of Heat Completely Heals Scratches On This New Protective Coating
It’s easy to shrug off a few dings on your car, but the touchscreen you’re staring at all day long? To some, a scratch on their smartphone is like being personally wounded, and it’s spawned an entire sub-industry selling cases and protectors for babying your gear. But what if the next time your smartphone got…
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New Noise-Blocking Material Could Make Jets And Drones Super Quiet
The most effective way to block an annoying sound is to simply build a barrier — the thicker, the better. But instead of everyone living in sound-blocking caves in a few years as noisy drones criss-cross the skies, researchers at Boston University have engineered an acoustic meta material that’s designed to silence annoying sounds at…