Great Ball Of China

The recent Sichuan Earthquake in China was so intense, tremors were felt all the way over in the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan...a whole eight minutes after the quake originated. What's interesting about the 101 is that it has a gigantic suspended tuned mass damper, or hanging ball, which takes up four stories and works like this to prevent the building from falling over and tragically crushing office workers.

This 730 ton sphere looks intimidating when still, but wait until you see it in motion during the earthquake.

This ginormous ball (of which the soon to be completed world's tallest building Burj Dubai has nine) was installed in-place from 41 discrete steel plates because the combined weight of 730 tons would have been too heavy to lift by crane. The people even came up with a nickname for it: the Damper Baby. The architects were forced to install it because of high winds and the fact that the Taipei 101 is only 600 feet from a fault line.

In order to get up to the observation floor where you can see the top of the ball, you have to ride in the world's fastest elevator.