Ah, freshman college orientation—a time of boisterous dorm rivalries, a capella tryouts, and helping your institution's upperclassmen construct a rickety three-dip roller coaster out of wood. This tradition is particular to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where what is normally a small leafy lawn near the East Campus dorm has become a temporary amusement park.

A bridge made of grass

NASA has previously tested simple 3D-printed rocket components, such as combustion chambers and fuel injectors, but if the technique is to be practical, it has to cope with more complex items ... like a rocket engine turbopump.

The 35-mile tunnel that runs below the Swiss Alps is now complete.

This is like the Matryoshka Doll of the crane world.

Too tired to stand on the crowded subway? Now you've got a chair.

Will the international pledges to reduce emissions be enough to save small island countries already affected by climate change? Kiribati is an island republic in the Pacific and its president says parts of most of its islands are submerging. He says the world, which has contirbuted to climate change, has a moral obligation to help countries like his. Kiribati is now facing the prospect of relocating its entire population if it can't be saved.

After being surprised by online responses to her appearance in a recruiting ad, engineer Isis Wenger wanted to see if anyone else felt like they didn't fit a "cookie-cutter mold."

Last month, the US Patent and Trademark Office approved an application from Airbus' Marco Prampolini and Yohann Coraboeuf for an "ultra-rapid air vehicle and related method of aerial locomotion." In other words, Airbus just patented a hypersonic jet. Airbus expects the jet to reach speeds as high as Mach 4.5 — or 4 1/2 times the speed of sound.

The boxfish's unique armor draws its strength from hexagon-shaped scales and the connections between them, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found.

Water's surface needs to be pressed at the right speed for an adequate amount of time, up to a certain depth, in order to achieve jumping," said the study's co–senior author Kyu Jin Cho, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul National University. "The water strider is capable of doing all these things flawlessly

What if I told you that recent experiments have revealed a revolutionary new method of propulsion that threatens to overthrow the laws of physics as we know them? That its inventor claims it could allow us to travel to the Moon in four hours without the use of fuel? What if I then told you we cannot explain exactly how it works and, in fact, there are some very good reasons why it shouldn’t work at all? By Steven Thomson.

Animated illustration and description of the Alpha configuration Stirling engine.

This amazing video shows the effect of Lenz's Law - as the magnet falls it induces a current in the copper pipe.

In a suburb of Bristol, in western England, not far from the Welsh border, a band of engineers are building a machine that they hope will make the biggest jump in the century-long history of the official world land-speed record, taking it from a smidgen above the speed of sound to 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) per hour. That’s roughly the cruising speed of a fighter aircraft, but it’s considerably harder to achieve at ground level, where the atmosphere is far thicker.

The world's first robot that jumps from the surface of water has been developed by a team of Korean roboticists and engineers.

A summer program at Johns Hopkins University puts high schoolers' ingenuity to the test — building bridges out of nothing but spaghetti and glue.

Basic Kinematics of Constrained Rigid Bodies from CMU

A blog for mechanical design engineers related to machine component and mechanism design.