French engineers have been experimenting with a technique that could redirect seismic energy away from structures such as cities, dams, and nuclear power plants, sparing them from damage. It involves digging large, cylindrical boreholes into the ground, forming a defensive geometry of lace-like arrays that, researchers hope, could deflect seismic waves and thus make whole landscapes "invisible" to earthquakes.
To us, the bridge is a way to get across the water, but to cormorants in San Francisco Bay, the old Bay Bridge is home sweet home. And the 800 protected birds currently nesting there are not very keen on moving to the new Bay Bridge span—despite its shiny $700,000 bird "condos." If Caltrans can’t lure the cormorants away in time, then the plan to demolish the old Bay Bridge
The only two options that freight trains have for accessing the east side of the Hudson River are to cross a bridge in Albany—140 painstaking miles North of New York City—or to ride a rail barge across the Hudson through the highly efficient marine-rail operation run by NYNJ Rail in Jersey City.
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Did you know a bike rack can become a fold-down seat? Or that you can charge your phone at sign posts? Or that a barricade is easily repurposed as a bench? These are just some of the small but imaginative hacks that make the concrete jungle a slightly more delightful and welcoming place.
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Fryer oil turns plain old potatoes into delicious french fries. It powers our biodiesel cars. And, now, it’s being used to turn the dusty surfaces of rural Canadian roads into stable makeshift asphalt—AND THEY SMELL LIKE FRENCH FRIES. God bless our obsession with that infernally unhealthy liquid.
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The Left Coast Lifter sits docked in Hudson Harbor after its trip through the Panama Canal, coming to New York from San Francisco. Nearly 30 stories tall and able to lift up to 1,900 tons, the Left Coast Lifter now waits for construction work on The New NY Bridge to begin. [Photo by Nicholas Stango]
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If you remember President William Henry Harrison from U.S. history class at all, then you probably remember him as the poor fellow who died from pneumonia a month after delivering his inaugural address in freezing rain. Except was it really pneumonia after all? A New York Times article suggests a different theory, and a cautionary tale against giving long speeches instead turns into one against improper sewage systems.
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You’ve heard the cautionary tales about dialing 911 on your cell phone. A call about missing children in Illinois gets routed to Canada. A stroke victim in New York is only located after a grueling eight-hour search. Locating 911 calls in 2014 is a byzantine process that involves generating a fake phone number—but a Next Generation 911 system that integrates text and video is in the (somewhat) near future, if we can only can get our collective shit together.
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The vast and looping knots of L.A.’s elaborate freeway system have long inspired an unlikely stew made from equal parts road rage, suffocating air pollution, and an unexpected aesthetic appreciation for their stacked coils and crisp lines. A drivable geometry textbook, the freeways are perhaps the city’s real monuments, Stonehenge-like megastructures that novelist J.G. Ballard would call "motion sculptures in space," abstract works of automotive art too easy to miss for all the oil stains and honking.
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A couple of Israeli students figured out a way to create fake traffic jams using the popular, Google-owned Waze GPS app. And while it sounds silly at first, these kinds of infrastructure hacks could have serious consequences as we depend more and more on data to help us get around town.
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