Cement is powder that turns into stone through an actual chemical reaction, not a physical drying process, and that one fact explains why concrete cures underwater, why it takes 28 days to rate, and why the reaction that makes modern civilization possible is also responsible for roughly 8 percent of global CO2 emissions.
Civil-Engineering
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Concrete and Cement: The Chemistry of Civilization -
How Bridges Carry Load Every bridge design is really just an argument about which member gets to be in tension and which gets to be in compression, because a structure only needs to solve one problem: get load from wherever it lands to solid ground without any single member being asked to do a job its material is bad at. Beam, arch, suspension, cable-stayed, and truss bridges are five different answers to that same argument.