What is the most impressive engineering feat by animals?

 You know you’ve built something significant when it is spotted via satellite imagery.

What you are looking at is the largest known dam to be built by beavers. It spans 850 meters wide. It was discovered via Google maps.

To date, only one person has been to the location, and only spotted one active beaver at the site—though there are likely several others working to maintain this huge dam. ( Source: The largest beaver dam on Earth can be seen from space. Daniel Martins)

Beavers were nearly hunted to extinction in Canada due to the fur trade but are making a comeback thanks to conservation efforts.

And yes, beavers can be a nuisance:

But they are engineers at heart, assessing and then gathering the correct resources to build housing for their families.

Beavers build dams to stop streams, creating a small, quieter pond for their homes. These ponds become wetland ecosystems that are good for the environment. (Although they do occasionally cause a flood on a golf course.)

They are extremely industrious, rivaling ants in output, working day and night to alter their surrounding environment, sometimes altering the path of entire river systems.

These huge dams last a long, long time and can be seen from up in space. Not bad for a bunch of rodents.

What is the strangest engineering failure in history?

 I was still very young back then and had no experience, but my father taught me about it.

In China in the 1970s, most people received very little education.

Many people had the strange idea, but it was essentially a variation of the perpetual motion machine, and most of them were what you might call the first kind of perpetual motion machine.

Many people became obsessed with these ideas, and some lost all their possessions.

At the time, this enthusiasm for perpetual motion machine research spread throughout the country, and in 1977, the People's Daily published three consecutive articles openly condemning perpetual motion machines, even going so far as to criticize the act of organizing specialists to develop them as "the most foolish plan in the world."

In May 1978, we published another article titled "Dispelling the Illusion of Perpetual Motion Machines."

Anyone with even a basic understanding of Chinese politics should know what it means when the People's Daily intervenes.

At that time, a method called "ultrasonic heating," which heated water without using coal, was popular.

Essentially, it was nothing more than a water pipe with a thin sheet of iron welded to one end, placed underwater.

It was said that when cold water flowed through the pipe, the metal plate vibrated, generating what is known as "ultrasonic waves," which then heated the water in the bathtub.

I have never seen the actual device myself. The image was generated by AI.

Theoretically, cold water has potential energy due to gravity, so it is possible that a small amount of heat could be generated.

However, in reality, it had no effect whatsoever.

According to my father, this device was installed in public bathhouses back then, but its only effect was that occasionally someone would suddenly jump out of the bath clutching their bleeding bottom...

I felt it was necessary to record that absurd period in our country's history because I realized that many of our compatriots no longer know about it.

What are the greatest engineering blunders in the world?

 In 1990 NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope worth $1.5 billion (16 billion rn).

After the launch, the scientist found out that there is a microscopic defect of two micrometers (a fraction of a human hair) in its primary mirror. This produced blurry, distorted images.

Even a microscopic defect is a big problem for a space telescope, so in order to fix the error NASA subsequently launched the STS-61 mission.

Basically the mission is about sending astronauts into space using the Space Shuttle Endeavour and fixing the defective optics.

Three years after its launch (1993) the astronauts successfully installed corrective optics, restoring Hubble's iconic vision.

Before and after correcting the lens.

The whole operation cost NASA 900 million to install a corrective lens in orbit to fix it.

Image taken by Hubble.

What feat of engineering have you found absurdly brilliant?

 On the 81 motorway, which runs from the Swiss border to Stuttgart, at a certain point an abnormal tower appears on your right : it is the test tower for

Thyssen Krupp

's high-speed elevators

, with cabins that reach speeds of up to 18 m/s.

The 246m high tower also has a

240-ton

mass damper and is entirely covered by a “fabric” made of

Teflon and fibreglass , which in addition to protecting the structure from temperature changes, is positioned in such a way as to dampen the effect of the wind.

At the top there is a conference room and a platform from which to observe the beautiful surrounding panorama of Baden-Württemberg.