Out of Concrete and Drudgery Come Canoes That Float

But at the National Concrete Canoe Competition, civil engineering students use a material that is normally the stuff of dams and parking garages to build a 20-foot-long craft that will float even if completely swamped. To do so, they replace the gravel and sand of conventional concrete with exotic materials like glass spheres. The result, to judge by the finals of this year’s competition, where 23 teams of 10 or more students gathered at the University of Illinois here, is a concrete that is

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