The days of putting up with crumbling asphalt streets might just come to an end. Construction company VolkerWessels has revealed plans for recycled plastic roads that are both more sustainable and more practical than old-fashioned blacktop. Besides reusing material, they’d last about three times longer and survive greater temperature ranges (between -40F and 176F) — despite their fragile look, they’re less likely to crack under the strain of vehicles or the weather. You can pre-assemble them to lay them down faster, too, and their hollow structure is handy for cabling and pipes. This is just a concept at the moment, but VolkerWessels fully intends to test it and make sure that it holds up in the real world. That’s not idle talk, either. The Dutch city of Rotterdam is interested in trying out these plastic surfaces in its “street lab, ” and the company hopes to have an honest-to-goodness route in operation within three years. If the idea still sounds outlandish, look at it this way: it’s likely the closest you’ll ever get to driving a Hot Wheels track in real life. Filed under: Transportation , Science Comments Via: The Guardian , IEEE Spectrum , Slashdot Source: VolkerWessels
Original post:
Plastic roads may put asphalt to shame
MarkWhittington writes: The quest for cheap access to space, to make space travel as inexpensive as air travel, has eluded engineers, government policy makers, and business entrepreneurs from before the beginning of the space age. It has become axiomatic, almost to the point of being a cliché, that the true space age will not begin until launch costs come down significantly. Forbes reported about a company called Escape Dynamics that has a unique approach to the problem. The company proposes to launch payloads into low Earth orbit on beams of microwaves. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
