Science & technology | Engineering

Knitting a road with stones and string

Greener road-building

Gordias eat your heart out

SINCE THE Romans began doing it with great panache more than 2,000 years ago, road-building has been a sweaty, grubby business, involving heaving great quantities of rocks and stones into place and, in more recent times, covering the surface with asphalt or concrete. Now a group of Swiss researchers think they have come up with a more elegant solution. Strange as it may seem, this involves knitting.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “How to knit a road”

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