Sep 26
Now that the new Bay Bridge is here, what to do with the old one…? Is the slow and expensive demolition
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Sep 26
Green Bay drivers were treated to an unwelcome surprise yesterday, when the discovery of a dramatically sagging pier on the heavily trafficked Leo Frigo bridge (named after a cheese magnate, because Wisconsin) forced its indefinite closure. The incident coincided with a new AP report about the deteriorating state of American bridges, which seems like a perennial source of national hysteria these days. But we shouldn’t regress to river-fording just yet.
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Sep 25
Conventional data transmission techniques rely on two-dimensional signals to carry the information down a pipeline, but there’s only so much potential bandwidth to go around. There are only so many signals you can pack into a given plane before they begin to overlap and interfere with another. But if we were to add an additional third plane, science could conveniently sidestep that technological roadblock. And that’s exactly what a team at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) has done.
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Aug 28
Sometime in the next few months, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System will flip the switch on the largest solar plant of its kind in the world: A 377-megawatt, 3,500-acre solar thermal energy system. It’s located in California’s Mojave Desert near the Nevada border and it’s ridiculously big. I would suggest going to check it out in person during your next Vegas binge weekend, but from the 15 freeway it’s little more than a silvery blur—a rippling, mirage-like, silvery blur that feels like it might sear your retinas if you look at it too long. So it’s a good thing they’ve just posted this incredible virtual tour.
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Aug 24
There’s way more to building a road than just slathering some asphalt all over the ground. The process is actually pretty involved, with a bunch of steps you probably hadn’t thought of. And even a little bit of art to it.
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Aug 22
Between the Great Recession and federal Sequestration cuts, officials at all levels of government are scrambling to scrimp and save money anywhere they can, no matter how offbeat the method. Even if it means foregoing the latest technological solutions for a more traditional, holistic approach—like exploiting the superhuman sensory abilities of animals.
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Aug 13
Hey, you know how it is. One minute you’re walking down a London street, minding your own business, when you accidentally step into a police call box and all of a sudden you’re inside the TARDIS and the Doctor has enlisted your help fighting aliens. I hate when that happens.
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Aug 12
In June, Mayor Bloomberg presented a 438-page proposal that laid out hundreds of ways in which New York needs to adapt to survive storms like Sandy, which hit the city almost a year ago. Some of his recommendations were sensible, others were intriguing. Most of them seeemed like long-term investments. But the city is actually already moving on several significant infrastructure upgrades—and they’re poised to change the face of NYC forever.
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Jul 31
In coffee shops and bookstores across Seattle this summer, advertisements for concerts and gallery shows shared space with a less common urban invitation: to a party for a really big drill.
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Jul 19
Though jokes can be cracked about Detroit from afar, it doesn’t change the fact that there are real people suffering through the downfall of a once proud city. It’s terrible. It’s sad. And it doesn’t get more heart wrenching than these mashed-up photographs that show what a Detroit High School once looked like, normal and happy, and what it looks like now, abandoned and destroyed.
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