Thus do we master the physical world.

From Mechanical Engineering, a journal published by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1919.

Not the moving parts kind, but the wedge/screw/lever kind. Want to move giant blocks of stone a few miles, but the locomotive and crane haven’t been invented yet? Nature‘s answer… by waiting until winter and freezing the streets:

Some of the largest stones used to construct Beijing’s Forbidden City beginning in 1406 were hauled from distant quarries on wooden [...]

I’ve seen this in a few different venues, but Laughing Squid brings the best of it together. A dad, frustrated at the thought of buying his son a prosthetic hand for tens of thousands of dollars, instead figured out how to print one for about $10 in materials:

Two years ago, his father Paul McCarthy saw a video of [...]

Gigaom takes the two great tastes of home manufacturing and carbon crystalline structures and makes them taste great together with a 3D printer that creates objects out of graphene:

Mining and technology development company American Graphite Technologies announced this week that partner researchers at the Kharkov Institute of Physics in in Ukraine received final approval to begin researching [...]

Says it all right there. You want to see inside the world’s largest particle accelerator? Street View will take you into the underground tunnels:

We’re delighted that CERN opened its doors to Google Maps Street View allowing anyone, anywhere in the world to take a peek into its laboratories, control centers and its myriad underground tunnels housing cutting-edge experiments. [...]

This was all over Reddit and ScienceDaily today, because it’s cool. Biologists have found the first example of machine-like gears in a living organism, a critter called an adolescent Issus:

Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears [...]

People seem to like caissons (pressurized chambers used to build foundations underwater), or so my search referrals tell me.

Well, here’s what working in a caisson can do to you – give you the bends, or something like it. To avoid that, yer construction crew needs to go into a thing like this. Once they take off the deep-sea [...]

BBC has the details on the space-agency’s successful test of a printed fuel injector:

The part is used to deliver liquid oxygen and hydrogen gas to an engine’s combustion chamber.

…

NASA said that California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne had made the injector using a method called selective laser melting (SLM).

The technique involves turning a computer-designed object into a real-world part by controlling [...]

By about four times, BBC reports. Using double beams of light quadruples the data capacity of fiber-optic cables:

What limits the distance a given light signal can go is how much power is in the beam. But the higher the power, the more the light actually interacts with the material of the fibre, rather than merely passing through it.

That [...]