What the first thing you think of when you hear the word "drone?" It might be killing machines
Unlike nearly every other traffic light in the U.S., the traffic light up on Tipperary Hill in Syracuse, New York displays green above red. Why this bizarre reversal? Well, St. Patrick’s Day is an appropriate time to tell this story.
I remember the first time I saw a Santiago Calatrava bridge, a spinal column of calcium-white ribs snaking across a Spanish ravine. "That’s cool," I thought. Then, a few years and a few thousand miles away, I saw another one. And another one. And another one.
Here in the U.S., the arrival of a new tunnel boring machine is huge news, warranting naming ceremonies
If the salmon won’t come to the ocean, then the ocean will come to the salmon. Well, not quite: Tanker trucks will take them there. Such are the extreme measures in California this spring, as drought forces major salmon hatcheries to funnel their fish into tanker trucks and ride them straight to the Pacific.
On Wednesday, a sudden gas explosion leveled two buildings in Harlem, killing at least seven people. Hordes of reporters arrived within minutes to cover the story, as did a random guy with a quadcopter. And, with apologies for the autoplay, this is the footage he captured in the immediate aftermath of the collapse:
Human civilization has littered the natural terrain with sprawling megastructures too big to be entirely seen from the ground. But when seen from above, isolated from their surroundings—as in the work of Jenny O’Dell—these vast tangles of organized chaos will wreak even more havoc on your sense of scale.
From the Golden Gate Bridge to an ancient Japanese bell, the physical structures around us are humming with secret sound. Artist Bill Fontana has made a career of capturing these haunting and complex soundscapes. As an artist at residence at CERN, he’s mostly recently been listening in on the world’s largest particle collider.
For something as ubiquitous as the internet today, it certainly isn’t easy to find where it all started. I don’t mean historically, I mean logistically: 3420 Boelter Hall is a tiny room in a basement hallway of a large nondescript building on the sprawling UCLA campus.
Andrew Emond, a Montreal-based photographer, amateur geographer, and DIY gonzo spelunker of the city’s sewers and lost rivers, has just re-launched his excellent website, Under Montreal. The revamped site now comes complete with a fascinating, interactive map of the city’s subterranean streams, documenting Montreal’s invisible rivers for all to see.