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new water-repellant concrete impregnated with tiny superstrong fibers promises to leave roads and bridges free of major cracks for up to 120 years. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee civil engineers have developed a concrete mix that is durable and superhydrophobic. They call it Superhydrophobic Engineered Cementitious Composite (SECC). Preventing normally porous concrete from absorbing water means that liquid can’t get inside, freeze and cause it to crack. The concrete’s unusual characteristics, including being significantly more ductile than traditional concrete, means that cracks that do form do not propagate and cause failure. “Our architecture allows the material to withstand four times the compression...

Researchers at MIT are seeking to redesign concrete — the most widely used human-made material in the world — by following nature’s blueprints. In a paper published online in the journal Construction and Building Materials, the team contrasts cement paste — concrete’s binding ingredient — with the structure and properties of natural materials such as bones, shells, and deep-sea sponges. As the researchers observed, these biological materials are exceptionally strong and durable, thanks in part to their precise assembly of structures at multiple length scales, from the molecular to the macro, or visible, level. From their observations, the team, led...

A 3,500-year-old inscription on a stone block found in Egypt is what archaeologists say the oldest weather report of the world. The inscription on a six-foot-tall calcite stone, called the Tempest Stela, describes rain, darkness and "the sky being in storm without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses," according to Nadine Moeller and Robert Ritner at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute who have translated the 40-line inscription. The stela's text also describes bodies floating down the Nile like "skiffs of papyrus." "This was clearly a major storm, and different from the kinds of heavy rains that Egypt...

Uncovering the secrets of the Great Pyramid August 29 2004 at 01:18PM By Annick Benoist Paris - Two French amateur archaelogists this week published a book in which they claim to have located the secret burial chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops near Cairo, the largest pyramid ever built. According to the study of the Great Pyramid, a fourth, undiscovered room lies underneath its so-called Queen's chamber, and is likely to have been the burial chamber for Cheops, an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled from 2560 to 2532 BC. Cheops' final resting place has never been found despite decades of investigation...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - A pair of French Egyptologists who suspect they have found a previously unknown chamber in the Great Pyramid urged Egypt's antiquities chief to reconsider letting them test their theory by drilling new holes in the 4,600-year-old structure. Jean Yves Verd'hurt and fellow Frenchman Gilles Dormion, who has studied pyramid construction for more than 20 years, are expected to raise their views during the ninth International Congress of Egyptologists in Grenoble, France, which starts Monday. They also published a book about their theory this week. Standing in their way is Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt's Supreme...

Jean-Pierre Houdin -- who was rebuffed three years ago by Egypt in his appeal for a probe into how the Pyramid was built -- said 3-D simulation and data from a U.S. egyptologist, Bob Brier, pointed to two secret chambers in the heart of the structure. The rooms would have housed furniture for use in the afterlife by the pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops in Greek, he told a press conference. "I am convinced there are antechambers in this pyramid. What I want is to find them," he said. In March 2007, Houdin advanced the theory that the Great...

Using cutting edge technology, Egyptologist Bob Brier of the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University delved into the only standing wonder of the ancient world, the Great Pyramid, and uncovered the mystery behind cracks in the massive Egyptian structure, unearthing a new room along the way. Brier, French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin and a team of software specialists from Dassault Systems in Paris used 3-D modeling software to determine that the burial chamber's stone support beams cracked as final construction of the Giza wonder was near completion 4,500 years ago. The team discovered that the cracks occurred when three...

A French architect said on Friday he had cracked a 4,500-year-old mystery surrounding Egypt's Great Pyramid, saying it was built from the inside out. Previous theories have suggested Pharaoh Khufu's tomb, the last surviving example of the seven great wonders of antiquity, was built using either a vast frontal ramp or a ramp in a corkscrew shape around the exterior to haul up the stonework. But flouting previous wisdom, Jean-Pierre Houdin said advanced 3D technology had shown the main ramp which was used to haul the massive stones to the apex was contained 10-15 meters beneath the outer skin, tracing...

PARIS - A French architect claimed Friday to have uncovered the mystery about how Egypt's Great Pyramid of Khufu was built — with use of a spiral ramp to hoist huge stone blocks into place. The construction of the Great Pyramid 4,500 years ago by Khufu, a ruler also known as Cheops, has long befuddled scientists as to how its 3 million stone blocks weighing 2.5 tons each were lifted into place. Ending eight years of study on the subject, architect Jean-Pierre Houdin released his findings and a computerized 3-D mockup showing how workers would have erected the pyramid at...

Peter James believes ancient Egyptians formed the huge tombs by piling up rubble and small rocks on the inside and attaching the large bricks on the outside later rather than using giant blocks carried up ramps. There's much debate over how the pyramids were buil AN engineer dubbed Indiana James has stunned archaeologists by rubbishing their theories on how the pyramids were built. Peter James believes ancient Egyptians formed the huge tombs by piling up rubble and small rocks on the inside and attaching the large bricks on the outside later. His claim challenges hundreds of years of accepted belief...

Like millions of tourists, from the Ancient Greeks on, the Blairs may have been victims of one of the world's oldest confidence tricks when they walked round the Pyramids on the Prime Minister's holiday trip to Egypt. To the uninitiated eye, the 2.3 million blocks of stones rising to a 146-metre peak on the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid near Cairo look as solid as pure granite. But French architects and scientists believe they are nothing more than weathered concrete blocks, moulded on the spot, stone by stone and layer by layer, from the ground upwards. The theory, being explored by ...

All of the current theories -- a long, straight ramp, a ramp that corkscrewed around the outside of the pyramid, or cranelike shadoufs (used in Egypt until recently for irrigating fields) -- have serious flaws... architect Jean-Pierre Houdin and I presented a radical new theory: that blocks of stone were raised to the very top of the pyramid on an internal ramp. We gave what we felt was strong evidence for the theory, which explains a French team's microgravemetric survey in the 1980s that recorded variations in the density of the pyramid... an image from the survey may show a...

At MIT, Hobbs and two colleagues teach a course called Materials in Human Experience... The MIT pyramid will contain only about 280 blocks, compared with 2.3 million in the grandest of the Great Pyramids... Hobbs describes himself as "agnostic" on the issue, but believes mainstream archeologists have been too contemptuous of work by other scientists suggesting the possibility of concrete. "The degree of hostility aimed at experimentation is disturbing," he said. "Too many big egos and too many published works may be riding on the idea that every pyramid block was carved, not cast." ...In 2006, research by Michel W....

Egypt's Pyramids Packed With Seashells Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Fossil-Filled April 25, 2008 -- Many of Egypt's most famous monuments, such as the Sphinx and Cheops, contain hundreds of thousands of marine fossils, most of which are fully intact and preserved in the walls of the structures, according to a new study. The study's authors suggest that the stones that make up the examined monuments at Giza plateau, Fayum and Abydos must have been carved out of natural stone since they reveal what chunks of the sea floor must have looked like over 4,000 years ago, when the buildings were...

Apr. 1, 2007 12:21 | Updated Apr. 1, 2007 14:53War of the pyramid theorists By YANIV SALAMA-SCHEER AND JORG LUYKEN Every significant historical site goes through periods of the day when the surrounding environment make a visit truly worthwhile. At the pyramids of Giza, the view at sunset can push away the claustrophobic memory of the flocks of tourists and local souvenir-sellers who dominate the site earlier in the day. In the hush of sunset, visitors can appreciate the beautiful symmetry of these ancient tombs as the half-light of dusk eradicates the imperfections of age that are evident during the...

Scientists say pyramids could be concrete April 23, 2008 Scientists are taking a new look at Egypt's pyramids to see if some of the blocks could have been made from concrete. Linn W. Hobbs, a materials science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Boston Globe there is a chance ancient Egyptians could have cast the blocks from synthetic material instead of carving them from quarries. Scientists have long believed Romans were the first to use structural concrete. Undergraduates in MIT's Materials in Human Experience class are building a scale-model pyramid made of quarried limestone and blocks cast from...

Mathematics in Ancient Egypt the Ancient Egyptians possess an ingenious skill for calculation? Assem Deif* works out an ancient problem The Greeks developed mathematics as a deductive science that reached its climax with Euclid of Alexandria in his masterpiece The Elements. Before that, during the ancient Egyptian era, mathematics was an inductive discipline of a utilitarian nature used to perform practical tasks such as flood control or land measurement using rope. It has been suggested that mathematics then amounted to no more than the two-times table and the ability to find two-thirds of any number. The whole structure of Egyptian...

Riddle Of The Great Pyramids Of Giza: Professor Finds Some Building Blocks Were Concrete In partially solving a mystery that has baffled archeologists for centuries, a Drexel University professor has determined that the Great Pyramids of Giza were constructed with a combination of not only carved stones but the first blocks of limestone-based concrete cast by any civilization. Picture of the Great Pyramid (Kheops pyramid). (Taken by Alex lbh in April 2005 / Courtesy of Wikipedia) Ads by Google Michel Barsoum, professor of materials engineering, shows in a peer-reviewed paper to be published Dec. 1 in the Journal of...

The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study. The research, by materials scientists from national institutions, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs’ craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids. Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist. The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby...

Research team recreates ancient underwater concrete technology A University of Colorado at Boulder professor and his colleagues have taken a page from the writings of an ancient Roman architect and built an underwater concrete pier in the manner of those set in the Mediterranean Sea 2,000 years ago. CU-Boulder history Professor Robert Hohlfelder, an internationally known underwater archaeologist, said scholars have long been in awe of the engineering feats of the early Romans. A former co-director of the international Caesarea Ancient Harbor Excavation Project, he said the research effort was spurred by the stunning hydraulic concrete efforts undertaken at...