The previous research centers we visited had been in operation for a while. It seemed that everywhere you looked, something interesting was going on, and there were a lot of neat looking toys (read: very expensive pieces of lab equipment) to point the camera at. In Rio, the research center was still being built. While the actual building was complete, lots of the labs were waiting to have equipment installed.
That doesn't mean there was nothing going on. One lab was equipped with not one but two industrial CAT scanners. We'd only ever seen one of these before, at the American Museum of Natural History, where the researchers said it allowed them to be one of the few places in the world that could create a 3D reconstruction of fossils. Both of GE's use an X-ray intensity that would be unsafe for humans to scan hardware for defects and internal details.
John Timmer
The exterior of the building is very new and modern looking.
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But the majority of the labs were waiting for some hardware. That didn't mean all the researchers weren't busy, though. A number of them develop software, so all they need is a computer. (We didn't bother taking a picture of these because, well, most of you live it already.) One of them (Bruno Nunes) put together his own hardware to equip an Olympic canoe with GPS, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and Wi-Fi to provide coaches with live updates on an athlete's performance. But, after testing it out on a canoe at his brother's vacation house, Nunes handed it on to the Brazilian Olympic team, so we didn't get a chance to take a look at it.
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