Construction

This compact multitool tackles a range of measurement, drawing, cutting, and positioning tasks. If you're an architect, engineer, contractor, woodworker, or DIY enthusiast – or if you have one of those in your life – the Omni-R is worth a look.

If you live in a noisy urban area, you're gonna love the sound of this. Researchers in Switzerland have developed a material that can dampen street noise while being four times thinner than similar-performing absorbers used in construction.

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth in the UK have developed a way to use powdered discarded glass in building blocks for construction, which could make this versatile material a lot more sustainable.

How do you relocate an entire city block with 100-year-old brick buildings on it so you can build a multi-level subterranean shopping center, parking lot and subway connections underneath? With robots, of course.

From home-building micro-factories to wall-building excavators, robotic construction workers are coming on strong. Civ Robotics now brings bot benefits to the planning stage of the construction process with autonomous, battery-powered surveyors.

Oyster mushrooms and bits of bamboo sound more at home on a Chinese menu than stuck to the wall, but scientists have used this mix to make aesthetically pleasing tiles with bumps and textures that help regulate temperature much like elephant skin does.

Deep-sea sponges have a secret: their light lattice-like forms are astonishingly stiff and strong. Inspired by these creatures, RMIT researchers have developed a new structure to make significantly stronger materials for more durable buildings.

What was supposed to be luxury high-rise living in NYC, with a sweet view overlooking the East River, turned into a financial fiasco and a construction blame game that put a halt to the potentially unfixable leaning tower described as banana-shaped.

Deep below the rugged landscape of central China lies an engineering marvel the size of a 60-story building, boring chunks of hard rock and soil, inch by inch, on a quest to bring water to millions of people.

When most of us think of freshly poured concrete, we picture a material that should be left to dry as smooth as possible. A new robot drives right over the stuff, however, gouging its surface to make structures stronger yet also cheaper to build.

Using a 3D printer that works with molten glass, researchers forged LEGO-like glass bricks with a strength comparable to concrete. The bricks could have a role in circular construction in which materials are used over and over again.

The ingenuity of ancient Egyptian engineers may have been more advanced than we thought. A currently unexplained ancient structure may have been part of a water purification system feeding a hydraulic lift to raise huge stone blocks to build a pyramid.