NAME: Oasis of the Seas
WHERE: Florida
COST: $1.2 billion
ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 2010
THE CHALLENGE: Build an 18-story-tall superliner with more outdoor space
When the Oasis of the Seas sets sail later this year, it will claim the record for biggest passenger ship, with space for 6,300 passengers, 2,000 more than any other ship. But it will also claim the most rooms with balconies, the biggest onboard swimming pool, and the first atsea, tree-fi lled, outdoor park. Those features were possible because of the ship's unique design. Traditionally, the top of the boat is built like one big box,with only a handful of rooms facing outward and an open deck area limited to the bow and stern. Instead, Royal Caribbean engineers widened the hull and split the box in half, erecting two six-story towers of cabins on either side, with enough space between them to fit the football field-size park.
To maneuver this new giant, three 20-foot-tall propellers pull rather than push the boat through the water. The propellers
Are mounted on swiveling pods along with electric motors (powered by diesel generators in the ship) delivering the equivalent of 30,000 horsepower. This system is more efficient, because it eliminates the need for a long drive
NAME: Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Crossing
WHERE: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
COST: $817 million
ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 2012
THE CHALLENGE: Construct the world's tallest arch bridge on a bed of sand
The winning entry in a design competition held by Dubai's Roads and Transportation Authority, the so-called Sixth Crossing will be a mile-long, 12-lane highway with the larger of its two arches reaching twice the height of the current record-holding Lupu Bridge in Shanghai, China. Designed by FxFowle Architects and engineered by Parsons Corporation,
The bridge will support more than 2,000 vehicles per hour and a commuter train. Between the two arches, a man-made island will hold an amphitheater and a ferry terminal. An arch bridge gets its strength from its shape. The weight of the roadway and everything on it is distributed outward along the curve of the arch and down to concrete walls, or abutments, on either side. Like bookends, the abutments keep the arch from flattening out. But anchoring them to Dubai's soft and unstable terrain poses one of the project's biggest engineering hurdles. "We typically build arches at locations where you have very good, solid rock, because the full weight of the arch is pushing against the ground," says Parsons engineer Ken Serzan. "But there is no rock here, just sand and then sandstone." So instead of installing the standard arch abutment, engineers will
Drill 200 holes—six and a half feet wide and 130 feet deep, half vertical and half inclined—and fill them with steel reinforced concrete. Spaced about 20 feet apart and topped off with a concrete cap, the enormous foundations can absorb and
Dissipate the full force of the bridge. Once the Sixth Crossing is completed in 2012, it will be more than simply a traffic fix. It will be a destination in its own right.
NAME: Alternative Multifunctional Underground Space
WHERE: Amsterdam
COST: $14.4 billion
ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 2028
THE CHALLENGE: Hollow out 900 million cubic feet of earth
To make a watertight underground urban oasis
Waterlogged Amsterdam might seem an odd place to construct a sprawling underground city. But the same team of Dutch engineers and architects building Amsterdam's subways believes it is ideal. That's because it sits about 100 feet above a thick layer of watertight clay. Confine the new city to the space between this clay and the sealed canal floors, and you've got a nearly premade foundation and roof. Then just build concrete walls that follow the line of the canal banks and seal off the water table to form a six-story watertight labyrinth. But the only way to create a stable construction site for the massive excavation on Amsterdam's marshy ground is to fill in the 17th-century canals with sand and dig down through them. As engineers hollow out each 1,000-foot stretch of ground, they will reuse some of what's removed to fill in the next stretch of canal, creating a second dry site. Once the outer support walls and top two floors of that stretch are done, they
Can reseal the canal floor and let the water flow back in. The space will span 31 miles of canals and contain roads,
Malls, sports arenas, and anything else you'd find aboveground except, of course, sunlight.
NAME: Gotthard Base Tunnel
WHERE: Swiss Alps
COST: $8 billion
ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 2017
THE CHALLENGE: Dig the longest tunnel ever, perfectly level; through the base of the Alps On opposite sides of an Alpine mountain range, engineers manning huge, rock-chewing machines are slowly inching toward each other. They've been at it for 13 years, some days burrowing through 82 feet, others less than 40 inches. But they're about to see the light in the middle of the tunnel. In early 2011, the northbound excavating team will make the final breakthrough, opening up a straight
35-mile shot that will shave 25 miles—or a full hour—off the trip from Zurich to Milan. Switzerland's Alp Transit designed the
new tunnel to replace the existing Gotthard, which winds up, down and around the Alps; its steep in lines and curves severely limit train speed and cargo capacity. The new, almost perfectly fl at pass will allow high-speed passenger trains and heavy freight trains with twice the cargo to race through at up to 155 mph. Digging the shortcut means sticking close to
The base of the mountain. The route crosses brittle fault lines and spans a layer cake of hard granite, soft shale and quartz. The most challenging area is a 5.3-mile leg in the middle called the Sedrun, which contains an unstable, high-pressure sandwich of hard and soft rock. Traditionally, diggers spray concrete on the walls of a newly bored tunnel to keep it from closing in on itself. But the soft rock here can deform under the weight of the mountain above it and close the hole by as much as 30 inches. So the team is anchoring deep into the tunnel walls pairs of interlocking steel rings connected by sliding
Joints. This experimental technique lets the mountain settle in a controlled way before engineers add the concrete. Heinz Ehrbar, Gotthard's chief construction officer, expects that the worst is behind them but, he says, "We always have surprises, even in good rock."
NAME: Bur Mubarak al Kabir
WHERE: Kuwait
COST: $7.37 billion
ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 2016
THE CHALLENGE: Erect a 3,300-foot building that's strong enough to withstand 150mph winds
==>The Empire State Building claimed the world's-tallest title for four decades. Today's record-holder, the more-than- 2,300-foot Burj Dubai, will be lucky to keep it for four years. The Kuwaiti government is about to break ground on the City of Silk, a designed-from-scratch metropolis on the Tigris and Euphrates river delta with a 3,284-foot tower as its centerpiece. At that height, winds could sway a conventional skyscraper like a tree branch and turbulent vortices could shake it to smithereens. So instead of building one shaky tower, London-based architect Eric Kuhne designed the Mubarak skyscraper as three interlocking towers, each twisting 45 degrees top to bottom to help stabilize it. The inside edges of the buildings meet in the center to form a triangular shaft through the middle [see inset below]. No matter which way the wind blows, two of the three towers will always brace the building. Although the three-pronged design keeps the high-rise from swaying, it doesn't counter the choppy winds that whip around the uppermost stories, which can cause damaging vibrations. So Kuhne is trying something never before done on a building: giving it vertical ailerons, the normally horizontal flaps on the trailing edge of aircraft wings that control rolling motion. The ailerons, which are only three to six feet wide, run the full length of each edge of the towers and mechanically adjust to redirect the changing winds around the structure and scatter the vortices, mitigating vibrations. The Mubarak's size is intended to accommodate Kuwait's explosive population growth, with seven 30-story neighborhoods stacked atop one another, each with apartments, offices and hotels, and four-story "town squares" linking them. Even the height has a cultural significance, Kuhne says. "One thousand and one meters for [the classic Arabian fairy tale] One Thousand and One Nights. It's the difference between bragging rights and telling a story."
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Long ago, Venus was thought to be Earth's twin – until measurements of its atmosphere revealed it to be a sweltering hellhole stifled by a runaway greenhouse effect. Now Europe's Venus Express spacecraft has found a new trait that both Earth and our sister planet share: an ozone layer.
The finding could help astronomers home in on life on other planets.
Venus Express found ozone's spectral signature in a layer 100 kilometres up in the planet's atmosphere, at concentrations of no more than 1 per cent those found in Earth's atmosphere.
Computer models suggest that Venus's ozone is formed when sunlight breaks up carbon dioxide molecules. The oxygen atoms freed in this reaction meet up on the planet's cooler night side to form molecular pairs (O2) and triplets (ozone, or O3).
"The key chemical reactions operating in Earth's upper stratosphere may also operate on Venus," write Franck Montmessin of the LATMOS atmospheric research centre in France and his colleagues in a paper describing the results.
Ozone is important for life on Earth because it blocks damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun. On Earth its abundance suggests the breakup of CO2 by sunlight was not its only source. Instead, ozone, along with molecular oxygen, O2, also originated from oxygen atoms generated by CO2-eating photosynthetic microbes at least 2.4 billion years ago.
Some astrobiologists have suggested that an atmosphere containing carbon dioxide, molecular oxygen and ozone all at once could be a sign of life.
But the new result, along with the fact that Mars had previously been found to have ozone at a concentration of 0.3 per cent that of Earth, suggests the mere presence of these molecules is not enough to prove the existence of life below.
Instead, it bolsters the idea that a planet must have at least 20 per cent as much ozone as Earth to suggest life. "On Venus as on Mars, the positive identification of this triplet is not associated with biological activity on this planet," the researchers write.
Mercury is covered with pits that are unlike anything else in the solar system, new observations from NASA's Messenger spacecraft show. They may have been formed by processes still active today, and change our view of the small rocky planet's history.
"The fact that these things are there at all is a big surprise," says David Blewett of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Messenger flew past Mercury three times before settling into orbit on 18 March. Those flybys – in 2008 and 2009 – revealed that some craters were filled with unidentified bright stuff.
Now, after more than a Mercury year (88 Earth days) in orbit, Messenger's high-resolution camera has revealed that the mysterious bright patches are clusters of shallow, rimless, irregularly shaped pits.
Each such "hollow" is between tens of metres to a few kilometres across and looks fresh and young – by planetary standards.
Other instruments on Messenger have found that Mercury's rocks contain a lot more volatile elements than expected. Blewett thinks the hollows formed when these elements – which are vaporised easily – were liberated from the surface, leaving behind a spongy, fragile matrix of soil that then collapsed.
Micrometeoroids and charged particles from the solar wind might have vaporised volatiles in the rocks, triggering the collapses.
Volatiles might also have been concentrated in pockets by volcanic eruptions that occurred during Mercury's long, frigid nights. In that case, volatile volcanic gases from the eruptions could freeze solid and get buried under lava flows. Later, a meteoroid impact could expose this material to sunlight, causing it to evaporate and the surrounding rock to crumble.
In either case, a lot of volatile stuff seems to be hiding beneath the surface of Mercury. That presents problems for theories that attempt to explain the planet's high density – an enormous two-thirds of its mass is made up of its metal core.
One theory argued that early on in the planet's life, the sun might have vaporised part of its rocky exterior. Another suggested that a large protoplanet smacked into it during its formation phase, blasting away its outer layers. In both cases, the heating involved would have evaporated volatile elements, allowing them to escape into space.
The fact that Messenger has found more volatiles than expected is stumping theorists trying to model Mercury's past. "The people who think about planetary-formation sorts of things are running back to their drawing boards," Blewett says.
Pay as you go is a common way of paying for calls on your cellphone. Now the idea could help make solar power a more realistic option for families in Kenya and other African countries.
The system, called IndiGo, consists of a low-cost flexible plastic 
Developed by solar energy firm Eight19, based in Cambridge, UK, IndiGo costs $1 a week to run, though the unit itself must be leased for an initial $10 fee. Users add credit by buying a scratchcard that they validate by sending a text message from their phone.
IndiGo is being trialled in Kenya and will be tested in other countries in the next few months. Eight19 hopes the device will go on sale early next year. The company also plans to offer higher-power systems as demand for solar energy increases, such as a 50W system that could power a small TV.
Many rural areas of countries such as Kenya are not connected to the electricity grid, so people light their homes using kerosene lamps. As well as being relatively expensive, these create smoke pollution and carbon emissions. Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Eight19, says the high cost of fuel locks people into a cycle of poverty. "They're paying disproportionately large amounts for their energy," he says – typically $2 or £3 a week.
Bransfield-Garth says the benefits of his firm's solar power system aren't just economic - it will improve access to power too. People in rural Kenya currently pay around $0.20 to charge their phone, and many also have to travel to a charger. One man in the trial used to make a 2-hour round-trip each week and wait another 2 hours to actually charge his phone. He can now do it at home.
"There's no doubt it's a great development," says Sabah Abdullah , who researches sustainable energy development in developing countries at the University of Bath, UK. But she warns that the system could be hard for people with low literacy levels to use and that relying on a mobile phone for payment could marginalise those who can't afford such devices. "These are the people who really need a step up in terms of electrification."
A theory of reality beyond Einstein's universe is taking shape – and a mysterious cosmic signal could soon fill in the blanks
IT WASN'T so long ago we thought space and time were the absolute and unchanging scaffolding of the universe. Then along came Albert Einstein, who showed that different observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of relativity unified space and time into a single entity - space-time. It meant the way we thought about the fabric of reality would never be the same again. "Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade into mere shadows," declared mathematician Hermann Minkowski. "Only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."
But did Einstein's revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn't think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space.
If this radical claim is true, it could solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped physicists for decades. What's more, it could set them on the path towards their heart's desire: a "theory of everything" that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.
So what is phase space? It is a curious eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space.
Momentum space isn't as alien as it first sounds. When you look at the world around you, says Smolin, you don't ever observe space or time - instead you see energy and momentum. When you look at your watch, for example, photons bounce off a surface and land on your retina. By detecting the energy and momentum of the photons, your brain reconstructs events in space and time.
The same is true of physics experiments. Inside particle smashers, physicists measure the energy and momentum of particles as they speed toward one another and collide, and the energy and momentum of the debris that comes flying out. Likewise, telescopes measure the energy and momentum of photons streaming in from the far reaches of the universe. "If you go by what we observe, we don't live in space-time," Smolin says. "We live in momentum space."
And just as space-time can be pictured as a coordinate system with time on one axis and space - its three dimensions condensed to one - on the other axis, the same is true of momentum space. In this case energy is on one axis and momentum - which, like space, has three components - is on the other (see diagram).
Simple mathematical transformations exist to translate measurements in this momentum space into measurements in space-time, and the common wisdom is that momentum space is a mere mathematical tool. After all, Einstein showed that space-time is reality's true arena, in which the dramas of the cosmos are played out.
Smolin and his colleagues aren't the first to wonder whether that is the full story. As far back as 1938, the German physicist Max Born noticed that several pivotal equations in quantum mechanics remain the same whether expressed in space-time coordinates or in momentum space coordinates. He wondered whether it might be possible to use this connection to unite the seemingly incompatible theories of general relativity, which deals with space-time, and quantum mechanics, whose particles have momentum and energy. Maybe it could provide the key to the long-sought theory of quantum gravity.
Born's idea that space-time and momentum space should be interchangeable - a theory now known as "Born reciprocity" - had a remarkable consequence: if space-time can be curved by the masses of stars and galaxies, as Einstein's theory showed, then it should be possible to curve momentum space too.
At the time it was not clear what kind of physical entity might curve momentum space, and the mathematics necessary to make such an idea work hadn't even been invented. So Born never fulfilled his dream of putting space-time and momentum space on an equal footing.
That is where Smolin and his colleagues enter the story. Together with Laurent Freidel, also at the Perimeter Institute, Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and Giovanni Amelino-Camelia at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, Smolin has been investigating the effects of a curvature of momentum space.
The quartet took the standard mathematical rules for translating between momentum space and space-time and applied them to a curved momentum space. What they discovered is shocking: observers living in a curved momentum space will no longer agree on measurements made in a unified space-time. That goes entirely against the grain of Einstein's relativity. He had shown that while space and time were relative, space-time was the same for everyone. For observers in a curved momentum space, however, even space-time is relative (see diagram).
Very funny and unexpected hidden camera! She finds you by surprise and make your photo in the most cheerful and not very pleasant circumstances. The camera works like a slingshot. Shot, flash and all smiles. The hunt for the most curious pictures! Very interesting and fun!
Designers: Sung Young Um & Jung Eun Yim 
