Building with air – how nature’s hole-filled blueprints shape manufacturing

By Anne Schmitz, Associate Professor of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Stout

If you break open a chicken bone, you won’t find a solid mass of white material inside. Instead, you will see a complex, spongelike network of tiny struts and pillars, and a lot of empty space.

It looks fragile, yet that internal structure allows a bird’s wing to withstand high winds while remaining light enough for flight. Nature rarely builds with solid blocks. Instead, it builds with clever, porous patterns to maximize strength while minimizing weight.

Human engineers have always envied this efficiency. You can see it in the hexagonal…

Read complete article

~	Why do our joints crack, pop and crunch and should we worry about it?

~	Medieval women used falconry to subvert gender norms

~	Not an artefact, but an ancestor: why a German university is returning a Māori taonga

~	A UK climate security report backed by the intelligence services was quietly buried – a pattern we’ve seen many times before

~	NASA’s Artemis II plans to send a crew around the Moon to test equipment and lay the groundwork for a future landing

~	A human tendency to value expertise, not just sheer power, explains how some social hierarchies form

~	Certain brain injuries may be linked to violent crime – identifying them could help reveal how people make moral choices

~	Clergy protests against ICE turned to a classic – and powerful – American playlist

~	Federal power meets local resistance in Minneapolis – a case study in how federalism staves off authoritarianism

~	Data centers told to pitch in as storms and cold weather boost power demand