Steel beams are pretty uniformly strong, but they're all run of the mill, literally. If you start 3D-printing custom beams for the exact purpose they're intended to serve though, you've got a regular space-age material on your hands. It's lighter than steel and orders of magnitude stronger. Read More >>

Take the blood of a freshly slaughtered animal. Mix thoroughly with preservatives and sand, pour into square molds, and bake for one hour. Allow to cool — then build your home from the result. No, really. Read More >>

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich has developed a rooftop mat made of a five-millimetre-thick polymer that can absorb water when it rains. The material changes properties along with the temperature—the mat becomes hydrophobic as it warms up, and the water is expelled, extracting heat from the building in a process the researchers compare to human sweat. The idea is to cool the interior with less reliance on air conditioning. It's hard to imagine how this is possibly going to work. Read More >>

So there you are, walking around on the world's most advanced aircraft carrier. Everything around you is a multi-million pound machine packed with advanced technology. Then something propped in the corner catches your eye. Is that an old wooden ladder? What the hell is that doing here? Read More >>

You want to give the handyman/woman thing a shot, but you don't want to invest in an entire toolbox worth of gear in case it turns out you're inept. Try Black & Decker's new Modular Matrix system—it fits most of a workshop in one relatively affordable handheld tool. Read More >>

A German heavy equipment manufacturer decided they'd impress potential buyers—or maybe just people with a fetish for construction equipment—by using a series of massive cranes to lift each other. Read More >>

Mundane but essential materials like plywood rarely get the recognition they deserve. Why shouldn't something so ubiquitous and just damn useful get its own short film? Read More >>

Today's mega-sized cruise liners are more akin to a floating city block than they are to any boat that harnessed the wind. And when they're sufficiently gigantic, these ships aren't even built in one piece—they're welded together from enormous prefab sections. Our friends at Oobject have 12 of the most impressive these Frankenboats. Read More >>