A water bridge, over a river!

This is 'way cool - one of the neatest things I've found on the Internet this year. It's a water bridge over the River Elbe near Berlin, in the city of Magdeberg. The bridge joins the former East and West Germany. For you history buffs, you'll remember that the Elbe is where Eisenhower halted the American advance into Germany at the end of the World War II. Little did anyone know at the time, but where the Americans halted their advance is roughly where the borders would be that formed two new countries for nearly 50 years - the two German states.

Anyway, this is quite a technological feat, and the photo is still hard to believe - I caught myself staring at it for about five minutes. A few more facts about this amazing bridge...

• It was built to observe reunification of the German state, which took place in 1990 (the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but Germany was officially reunified in 1990)

• This ingenuity didn't come cheaply; the bridge was built at a cost of €500 million, which translates to over $1 billion American dollars (and rising since the dollar is doing so poorly these days).

• And finally, a little quiz in physics. Does the bridge have to withstand the weight of the water, or the water and the ships crossing it?

Think about it for a second...

Think you know the answer?...

(I'll confess that I didn't - physics was not my strongest subject in high school, that's for sure)...

Answer: The bridge only needed to be designed to withstand the weight of the water.

Why? A ship always displaces an amount of water that weighs the same as the ship, regardless of how heavily the ship may be loaded. (When you read about ships, you always read about "displacement" and it's usually given in tons - that's the amount of water the ship displaces when it's in the water.)

What a sight this bridge is though - I'd love to see it in person some day.