Concrete is the most widely used building material on Earth, and making its key ingredient, cement, accounts for roughly 8 percent of human-caused carbon emissions, according to MIT. One of the simplest ways to cut that footprint is to use less concrete. MIT engineers have now shown a surprisingly low-tech way to do it: pour the concrete into molds sewn from fabric.
In a paper in the Journal of Building Engineering, announced by MIT News on November 6, 2026, a team led by civil engineer Josephi...
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low-carbon construction
Smart Bird – the ultra-light robot bird
A flying robot that imitates a bird has been created.
Plenty of robots can fly but none can fly like a real bird. Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull that flies by flapping its wings.
This invention of a flying robot imitates a bird. It takes off, lands and flies like a real bird.
The flying robot has a two-meter wingspan, and is made of a lightweight (450 gram) carbon-fiber skeleton body.
It uses hybrid drive technol...
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