practical engineering

NASA JPL engineers explain the final minutes of the Curiosity rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars, which combined aerobraking, a parachute and a skycrane. It lays out the tight sequence of events that all had to work automatically.

A 1983 behind-the-scenes film about making the HBO 'Feature Presentation' starship logo sequence. It shows the handcrafted miniature city, motion-control cameras and practical effects.

A short film following Moroccan artisans from Fez as they build a traditional 15th-century-style Moroccan court inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows zellij tilework and other traditional techniques.

Kirsten Dirksen profiles Steve Rees, who buried two shipping containers to build an earth-cooled, off-grid 640 sq ft home in Northern California for about $30,000, solar included.

Builders Matt Risinger and Jordan Smith visit a Swiss cross-laminated timber factory that makes thick all-wood walls with no traditional insulation and wooden nails instead of glue or chemicals. The video is sponsored by Siga.

Fred Dibnah, the English steeplejack, shows how ladders are fixed up the outside of a tall brick mill chimney. The footage was filmed in the mid-1990s and is part one of two.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

Part 1 of an episode of the British educational TV series The Secret Life of Machines, about how vacuum cleaners work and their history. It mixes humor with explanation of household technology.

Jim Browning reverses a scammer's remote connection and discovers CCTV in a Delhi call centre. He gives a detailed look at how a tech support scam operation runs, and he shared the footage with the BBC.