In addition to its legendary soccer prowess, Brazil now has one more thing to brag about: being home to the world’s tallest Lego tower.

Over 6,000 Brazilian children participated in the 4-day construction effort earlier this month in Sao Paulo, crafting small sections of the monument.

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Ask most engineers what drew them to the discipline, and crunching equations in the classroom probably doesn’t top any list. Studying explosions, building things, saving the planet—that’s more like it. A growing number of programs now give undergraduates a crack at cutting-edge research—often on socially relevant projects. Want to save lives when tsunamis strike? How about landing a robot on Mars or designing bomb-proof embassies? Check out our continuing series of posts on the country’s coolest engineering classes, which demonstrate that the fundamentals can still be fun.

After Japan’s devastating tsunami, did you wonder about building safer shelters? Students at Oregon State University’s College of Engineering in Corvallis not only get to design such structures; they can test them against the forces of nature in the Tsunami Wave Basin, the world’s largest, most sophisticated facility for studying earthquake-generated monster swells.

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Last year we reported on the sustainability efforts of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, which made the games the greenest yet. Vancouver was outfitted with solar panels, green roofs, and mechanisms to collect and recycle rainwater. Award medals were made from re-purposed electronic waste.

Now, Rio de Janeiro is aiming to create the first games with a zero-carbon footprint when it hosts the Summer Olympics in 2016.

To help the city achieve this goal, Swiss-based RAFAA Architecture and Design has proposed a Solar City Tower, which features a visually stunning energy-generating waterfall.

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The structure may resemble a postmodern radio tower or perhaps the lair of a James Bond supervillain, but it’s actually designed to be a hydrogen power plant.

Hydra, named after a tubular freshwater creature, is listed as an honorable mention in this year’s eVolo Magazine Skyscraper Competition (see more winning designs here). Its creators hail from Serbia, and include Milos Vlastic, Vuk Djordjevic, Ana Lazovic, and Milica Stankovic.

The most remarkable aspect of this structure is its ability to harvest energy from lightning bolts, which is then stored in several huge batteries at the base.

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Plans to develop an inflatable space station may soon be given the green light, FoxNews reports. A deputy administrator at NASA recently visited the Bigelow Aerospace facility in Las Vegas to discuss future additions to the International Space Station.

NASA has endorsed the concept of inflatable habitats and Bigelow Aerospace has already built, tested, and launched prototypes, hoping to have the first fully-developed space station in orbit by 2015. One of the main advantages to these new modules is cost reduction, as the lightweight yet impact-resistant material of the inflatable shells would allow them to be larger and less expensive than heavier structures.

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