Engineering
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How things are built, and why they don't fall down.
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Why bridges are made of triangles: a square folds, a triangle cannot
A square made of four pinned rods folds flat at the slightest push, but a triangle of three rods cannot change shape at all. That one fact is why bridges…
Why traffic jams appear out of nowhere
Sometimes a motorway grinds to a halt and then clears up with no crash, roadworks or merge in sight. That's a phantom traffic jam, and it starts with one…