Aug. 3, 1803: Crystal Palace Architect Born

• 1803: Joseph Paxton is born in Milton Bryan, England. His career will take him from garden boy to gardener to landscape designer to architect-engineer of the largest glass buildings of his day — including London’s famous Crystal Palace of 1851.

Paxton built a huge glass greenhouse at Chatsworth between 1836 and 1840 for his employer, the Duke of Devonshire. Queen Victoria knighted Paxton in 1850 not for his architectural accomplishments but for a horticultural achievement: coaxing the huge Victoria amazonica water lily to flower in a greenhouse.

The structure was to be of iron and glass on a concrete foundation. Its parts would be uniform, the whole building conceived in terms of of 24-foot bays or modules, repeated 77 times. It could be built extremely fast, because it was essentially prefabricated. But this is was not yet the exhibition building that would come to fruition.

-->July 31, 1971: Astronauts Drive on the Moon

• 1971: Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin drive the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the surface of the moon. It’s the first off-planet automobile ride.
• Forty years after Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind, the Apollo program remains a singular cultural and technological achievement. The application of so much technology to a single goal was nearly without precedent. Amongst all the gadgetry born of the Apollo program, the lunar rover ranks near the top of the cool scale.
• The rover was the most famous electric vehicle until that slick little two-seater from Tesla Motors came along, and it remains a technological marvel. The amount of tech packed into that little buggy still boggles the mind.
• The rovers were used to give the astronauts greater leeway in exploring the moon during the later, more science-heavy Apollo missions. Those space suits are bulky, and walking in them wasn’t easy. So, having a set of wheels expanded the astronauts’ range, because they weren’t restricted to walking short distances.

Scientists Drill a Mile Into Active Deep Sea Fault Zone

In the first deep sea drilling expedition designed to gather seismic data, scientists have successfully drilled nearly a mile beneath the ocean floor into one of the world’s most active earthquake zones.

Researchers aboard the drilling vessel Chikyu — meaning “planet Earth” in Japanese — used a special technology called riser drilling to penetrate the upper portion of the Nankai Trough, an earthquake zone located about 36 miles southeast of Japan. By collecting rock samples and installing long-term monitoring devices, the geologists hope to understand how stress builds up in subduction zones like Nankai, where the Philippine Sea plate plate is sliding beneath the island of Japan.

Riser drilling involves encasing a deep sea drill in a giant metal tube, called a riser, that extends from the ship down to the drilling site, effectively bolting the ship to the sea floor. The researchers circulate lightly pressurized mud down through the drilling tube and back up through the riser.

Using a riser also makes it easier to send core samples and cuttings, or small chips of rock collected during drilling, back up to the surface.

The Nankai Trough last ruptured twice in 1944 and 1946, generating earthquakes greater than magnitude 8 that shook the region and caused deadly tsunamis. Since then, the two plates have continued to move, but the boundary between them has been locked, causing pressure to build.

The Nankai project is part of an international effort called the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, designed to investigate a variety of scientific questions through drilling. The IODP chose to drill for seismic data in Nankai because of the region’s history of recent earthquakes and the accessible location of the rupture zone. The drilling is not powerful enough to trigger an earthquake.

What is learned in Japan will help scientists understand other earthquake-prone plate boundaries, such as the Cascadia subduction zone, which extends along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to Northern California

The first drilling and sampling operations in Nankai began on May 12 and are expected to conclude on August 1. After the initial drilling stage, scientists lowered various gauges and logging instruments into the hole to measure temperature, stress, water pressure and rock permeability. Once they gather enough data, the scientists will prepare the hole for future installation of long-term monitoring equipment.