Redrawing America’s political boundaries in two different ways, a tour of Hong Kong’s outdoor escala

Redrawing America’s political boundaries in two different ways, a tour of Hong Kong’s outdoor escalators, the race to build bigger bike share programs, and a devastating typhoon. Let’s start the week off right with some nice urban reads.

Read more…


    



The Business of Predicting the End of the World

The Business of Predicting the End of the World

Most of us only think about natural disasters when we absolutely have to (or when it’s, uh, for fun). But for scientists and analysts who work for global insurance companies, predicting the next big catastrophe is a business—and an increasingly lucrative one, at that.

Read more…


    



NYC’s First Inflatable Tunnel Plug Will Stop Floods, Smoke, and Gas

NYC's First Inflatable Tunnel Plug Will Stop Floods, Smoke, and Gas

After Hurricane Sandy decimated the subway system last year, officials pledged to install new devices to help halt the rising tides—including flood gates and, more intriguingly, a device called a "tunnel plug."

Read more…


    



One year ago today, much of New York City and the surrounding region was without power, its basement

One year ago today, much of New York City and the surrounding region was without power, its basements and transit tunnels flooded with seawater from the tidal surge and relentless rainfall of Hurricane Sandy, its suburbs caged in by fallen trees. Gawker’s own Lower Manhattan servers were inundated and we were working on a bare-bones Tumblr to keep delivering the news. Here are some links to help remember where the city was last year, and to see how far we’ve come, twelve months after Sandy.

Read more…


    



How to Protect Cities from Sandy-like Storms? It’s All About Islands

How to Protect Cities from Sandy-like Storms? It's All About Islands

One year ago, Superstorm Sandy tore a path of destruction up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Earlier this week, ten architecture and planning teams revealed their solutions for rebuilding the city in a way that would promote resilience when the next hurricane comes along. One big takeaway? We need new islands.

Read more…


    



San Francisco Launches a Website To Prep For the Big One

San Francisco Launches a Website To Prep For the Big One

Do you have an exit strategy for you and yours in place, should a major earthquake, terrorist attack, or similar large scale disaster occur? You should. And with the help of San Francisco’s new social emergency preparation website, you will.

Read more…


    



The worst flight you can possibly imagine apart from crashing

The worst flight you can possibly imagine apart from crashing

Imagine being trapped in a plane with six toilets and 26 passengers suffering constant explosive diarrhea and violent vomiting for 13 hours. Imagine it and shiver. That’s what happened in this Qantas flight from Santiago de Chile to Sydney, Australia.

Read more…

    

Scientists Replicate a San Andreas Fault Quake in Upstate New York

You’d think that in this day in age of digital software, scientists wouldn’t need to destroy a real building to test the strength of its materials. But that’s exactly what’s happening this summer in Buffalo, where a team of Johns Hopkins engineers are using a hydraulic “shake table” to recreate the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles.

Read more…

    

New Google Earth Hack Lets You Nuke Any City in Devastating 3D

New Google Earth Hack Lets You Nuke Any City in Devastating 3D

A perverse fascination with nuclear fallout and blast radii isn’t that weird. Don’t you want to know how hard you and everything you know is going to disappear from the face of the Earth in the unlikely case that some maniac drops twenty kilotons of atomic death on your front door? Now you can see a simulation of the mushroom cloud that will claim your life—in three dimensions.

Read more…

    

What Happens When a Drone Hits a Plane?

There’s still a mysterious black drone in Brooklyn, and the FBI can’t find it. Last week it appeared just 200 feet away from a passenger jet—that’s too close. What if it’d hit it? Bad things. Bad, dangerous things. More »