A 56,200 pound excavator took out nearly a third of a Kansas overpass with its boom raised, which left the highway underneath open and the county road on top shut for a year
SEP 18, 2026
Tech Editor & Advisor
Hugo Rojas
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise and deep knowledge of the space industry. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
—Latest by Hugo Rojas
A 70,000 pound load of honey bees rolled into a Washington ditch under a first estimate of 250 million insects loose, and the figure that survived a calculator was 14 million
SEP 18, 2026
A blade came off a 300 foot wind turbine above a Plymouth cranberry bog and landed hundreds of feet away, and investigators have not yet said publicly what made the joint let go
SEP 18, 2026
A 6 to 10 foot scour pit under one Sussex turbine is why 75,100 concrete cubes went onto that patch of seabed, but the first survey of what lives on them is still ahead
SEP 18, 2026
Say goodbye to steel, and the 10 times better strength for the weight in these Maryland softwood boards comes at roughly 10 times the price per pound
SEP 17, 2026
A bioengineer spent 5 days in a pitch dark cabin in Poland wearing the sensors she designs, and what took her sense of day and night away was the staff randomizing when meals arrived
SEP 17, 2026
An Iowa plant shreds 30,000 tons of retired blades a year into fiber for concrete, and the glass inside those blades is the grade that cement chemistry is known to attack
SEP 17, 2026
A towboat with 22 barges lost every rudder approaching a Mississippi bridge and the hydraulic pump that failed was never the problem, where the steering was lost during the attempt to fix it
SEP 17, 2026
Cameras at 24 Scottish turbine jackets counted about 1.5 times more fish close to the steel than far from it, but the group that dominated the frame was flatfish lying on the sand
SEP 17, 2026
Americans throw out 3 million tons of carpet a year, and the 116,000 square foot plant in west Phoenix that shreds 36 million pounds of it for nylon 6 is no longer on its operator’s site
SEP 17, 2026
Soil in 38 states holds jumping worms whose cocoons ride out the winter that ends every adult, while the one treatment proven to reach inside a cocoon is three days of 104 degree heat
SEP 16, 2026
A retired solar panel gives up its silicon at 99.998 percent purity after being scanned with green laser light, which never touches the glue that everyone assumes is the target
SEP 16, 2026
Divers scraping 3 clusters of solar floats 7 miles offshore counted 543 mussels for every square foot of surface, and the finding that matters is the dozen species that were not native to the water
SEP 16, 2026
A 75 foot tour boat sat on the reef 60 feet outside a Honolulu harbor mouth for 10 days, but the coral it came down on was already so thin that the damage was mostly to bare rock
SEP 16, 2026
People sealed in a windowless Bavarian bunker drifted onto a 25 hour day across 418 separate runs, while the body clock they were measuring turns out to be 11 minutes over 24
SEP 16, 2026
Crews drove 95 steel tubes of up to 1,985 tons into the North Sea and the record went to neither the tubes nor the crane, while the monopile gripper that earned it gets unbolted and shipped away
SEP 16, 2026
A Rhode Island pilot shredded 60 tons of derelict fiberglass boats and burned the pieces in a cement kiln, and the effort to scale that model targets the roughly 200,000 hulls Americans retire each year
SEP 15, 2026
A geologist of 23 spent 2 months beside an underground glacier with no clock and came up believing it was still August, where the stranger finding is that he counted 2 minutes and used up 5
SEP 15, 2026
Two tissues from 1 animal disagree on where it has been, and the gap between crab shell and muscle is how Rhode Island will learn whether turbines make crabs or only gather them
SEP 15, 2026
A truck carrying 21 research macaques rolled on a Mississippi interstate and 8 of the animals ended up loose in the grass, but only 1 of those 8 ever came back alive and he went to a sanctuary instead
SEP 15, 2026
A short heat treatment and acid wash on worn solar cells recovered silicon at 99.7 percent purity and shook most of the silver loose, letting a single process pull both metals from the same waste
SEP 15, 2026
A 377 foot recyclable blade on a 15 megawatt turbine off the Danish coast can be dissolved back to its fibers when it retires, but only 40 of the 72 machines there will carry one
SEP 15, 2026
Cigarette filters account for 35 percent of every piece of litter ever logged on California cleanup days, while the soft white tip that makes them the top item is plastic rather than cotton
SEP 14, 2026
Riding a weighted sled off a Greek island took a diver 702 feet down on one breath and he came back up fine, but the deeper dive he made 5 years later put him in a hyperbaric chamber
SEP 14, 2026
A tower section bound for 42 turbines missed its exit ramp near Ipswich and wedged under an overpass hard enough to shut the highway for two and a half days, and the bridge still cannot take heavy loads
SEP 14, 2026
An overpass in Houston with just 3 inches of clearance above the legal truck height logged 72 strikes in a single year, and only 8 of them ever made it into a police report
SEP 14, 2026
Chardonnay under tilting panels in southern France came in 60 percent above the uncovered rows beside it, and at the sister vineyard where researchers ran the same trial for 6 years the yield never moved at all
SEP 14, 2026
An Embraer carrying 53 people touched down long on a 5,810-foot runway in heavy rain at a Virginia airport, and a bed of crushable concrete blocks stopped it short of a highway embankment
SEP 13, 2026
A 30 foot wind turbine blade built with a plant based resin instead of standard epoxy broke down completely in six hours, and the glass and carbon fibers came out clean enough to build with again
SEP 13, 2026
Carpet recycling hit 38 percent in one state while the rest of the country stays near nine percent, and a fee charged on every square yard sold is what paid for the difference
SEP 13, 2026
A greenhouse glazed with see-through solar panels cut water use by 29 percent and raised snow pea yield by 12 percent, while six common vegetable crops grew as well as under ordinary glass in Perth
SEP 13, 2026
Sea nomads off the coast of Sulawesi spend as much as 60 percent of their working hours underwater, and the organ that evolved to make that possible is not the lungs
SEP 13, 2026
A single offshore wind blade broke apart 15 miles off Nantucket and scattered thousands of fiberglass pieces across beaches and the seafloor, and blades on 22 other turbines were later pulled down as well
SEP 13, 2026
Dried sea lettuce ground into powder and blended into cement at 5 percent of the mix by weight held construction grade strength while cutting the cement’s global warming footprint by 21 percent
SEP 13, 2026
Wind turbine blade fiberglass soaked in a 2 hour salt bath came back as nylon more than three times stronger and eight times stiffer than before
SEP 13, 2026
Inside a narrow fjord 80 miles from Juneau, a chunk of mountain with 80 million cubic yards of rock fell at dawn, and the wave climbed 1,578 feet up the opposite cliff
SEP 13, 2026
Nearly 1 million full size trucks and SUVs were told to run thicker oil instead of getting new engines, but the failures kept arriving and the regulator has logged hundreds of them since the repair
SEP 12, 2026
A 12 month project in Laramie cooked the resin out of scrap turbine blade in vegetable oil and got back an oil that softens tired road asphalt, but the commercial agent it was measured against is vegetable oil too
SEP 12, 2026
About 84 million cubic yards of rock came off an Alaska fjord wall and drove a landslide tsunami almost a third of a mile up the opposite slope, but the only things lost were a kayak and a camp
SEP 12, 2026
Piles of concrete pipe were dropped around 1 turbine foundation off the Dutch coast and tagged cod moved in and stayed, where the flat swept sand around them offers nothing to hide inside at all
SEP 12, 2026
Crews boomed a coastal Washington creek in 4 places after a tanker left the highway above it and put gasoline in the water, while the returning salmon were sent straight up that creek anyway
SEP 12, 2026
A plant in Magdeburg takes 1 old solar panel apart in the order it was built and recovers 98 percent of its weight, where a shredder handling the same panel would turn the silver and silicon into powder
SEP 12, 2026
Matted fiber leaves the screens at 14 New York sewage plants packed hard enough to hold the shape of the pipe, while the flushable label that takes the blame is on a fraction of it
SEP 12, 2026
Solar farms on 2 retired Minnesota fields seeded native prairie beneath their panels, and the native bee count ended up roughly 20 times higher while total insect numbers tripled
SEP 12, 2026
Volunteers who spent 5 days lying on a membrane over warm water lost 11 percent of the force in their legs, but the thigh muscle doing that work had shrunk by only a fortieth of its bulk
SEP 12, 2026
Sheep keep the grass down and 10 hives sit in the margins of a 620 acre solar farm in southern Virginia, where the pollen the bees bring back is the part being studied
SEP 11, 2026
A man lay face down in a hotel pool in Croatia for 29 minutes without taking a breath, and the breath hold he set there is a category that begins with 10 minutes of pure oxygen
SEP 11, 2026
A turbine blade between 75 and 100 feet long tore off a machine beside a Massachusetts cranberry bog and landed several hundred feet out in the mud, but the only visible clue is a dark stain high on the tower
SEP 11, 2026
A steel silo 43 feet tall in a small southern Finnish town is packed with crushed soapstone left over from making fireplaces, while the heat stored inside it has cut the local wood chip burning by about 60 percent
SEP 11, 2026
Inside a 255,000 square foot plant in northwest Georgia, a recycling line processes worn solar panels and says it recovers 96 percent of the material value, with nothing going to a landfill
SEP 11, 2026
