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Tech NewsThis Might Be the Reason Why Rio Can’t Clean Its Shitty Water for the Olympics
It sounded too good to be true. Thanks to the Olympics, Rio’s trash-ringed, sewage-contaminated Guanabara Bay would transform into a pristine watershed as the premiere venue for rowing and sailing. But the cleanup effort never materialized in earnest, and earlier this year, the city said it would actually take 20 more years. A new investigation … Continued
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Tech News
Google Is Opening a Detroit Office to Poach Auto Talent
Just few weeks after Google got us all excited about its impending fleet of autonomous Chrysler minivans, the company’s Self-Driving Car project announced that it’s packing up at least part of its operation and moving it to Detroit. Ford, hide your engineers! In a short post on its Self-Driving Car blog, Google confirmed that it … Continued
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EartherClimate Change
ExxonMobil Shareholders Vote to Ignore Climate Change Completely
If you try to imagine the most pathetic gathering of humans ever, it would probably look a lot like this group of people who have amassed their fortunes by stripping the Earth of its fossil fuels and are desperately trying to squeeze the last gasp of relevance out of a backwards-thinking, planet-strangling industry. This morning, … Continued
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Tech News
Six Freeway Removals That Changed Their Cities Forever
It seems counterintuitive, right? Rip out eight lanes of freeway through the middle of your metropolis and you’ll be rewarded with not only less traffic, but safer, more efficient cities? But it’s true, and it’s happening in places all over the world. Many freeway systems were overbuilt in an auto-obsessed era. It was decades later … Continued
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EartherClimate Change
RIP El Niño
It was called “too big to fail” and labeled a monster. In some ways, it never quite lived up to what were, quite frankly, unreasonable expectations. In other ways, it kept on giving, even when we thought it was all over. As of yesterday, El Niño has left us. In size and demeanor, the “very … Continued
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Tech News
How San Francisco Plans to Use Self-Driving Cars to Fix Its Housing Crisis
For a minute, try to forget the hype you hear about self-driving cars and think about the single-occupant, human-driven vehicle like this: A very inefficient way to use expensive city land. Not only do extra-wide roads take up a lot of space, there’s far too much property allocated to parking—about 20 percent of the land … Continued
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Tech News
NYC Built Two Yankee Stadiums in the Time it Took to Build the Second Avenue Subway
New York City’s Second Avenue Subway is scheduled to open on December 30, 2016—an astounding 96 years after it was first proposed. A lot has happened since 1920. In a charming infographic, DNAinfo looks at all the major infrastructural milestones which NYC accomplished in the time it took to get one subway line built. It’s … Continued
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Tech News
Stupid Cars Keep Ruining LA’s Newest Train
Los Angeles’s Expo Line, the first passenger train to go from downtown LA to Santa Monica in 60 years, started officially running on Friday afternoon. But Monday morning was the first time that thousands of eager commuters boarded it for work. That’s right about when a drunk driver crashed onto the tracks. Jerk! According to … Continued
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Tech News
A Cathedral-Like Cistern Beneath Houston Is Now Open to the Public
Public infrastructure is known for being utilitarian, uninspiring, and downright ugly. But not always. At first glance, this giant water storage system under Houston looks more like the pillared nave of an ancient cathedral. Now the lost space that’s larger than a football field is open for visits. The Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern was built … Continued
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Tech News
This Is How Your City Got Crazy Expensive
If you’ve been considering the idea of purchasing real estate, this map of “Million Dollar Listings” in the US’s priciest cities will make you want to roll up into the fetal position and bawl your eyes out. Trulia has compiled some maps and data for properties valued at $1 million and how those numbers have … Continued
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Tech NewsReasons to Cancel the Olympics, Ranked
Just before every Olympics, looming doubt starts to surface. Are the cities ready? Has the host country accepted its geopolitical consequences? Will people come? But this year’s games are especially troubled, and with the opening ceremonies less than 100 days away, the call to cancel Rio’s Summer Olympics has reached a fever pitch. Should Rio … Continued
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Tech News
How NYC’s Super Skinny Skyscrapers Stack Up Next to the World’s Tallest Buildings
Over the last two decades, a new type of building has invaded New York City: The super skinny supertall known as a “super-slender.” This new generation of skyscrapers range from 50 to 100 stories, are almost uniformly filled with luxury housing—and some are wedged into the city with astoundingly tiny 45-feet-wide footprints. An update of … Continued
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Tech News
Portugal Just Powered Itself Exclusively on Renewable Energy for Four Whole Days
Last week, the nation of Portugal achieved something remarkable. For 107 hours—about four days—the country ran on nothing but wind, solar and hydro power. Running a country of about 10 million people without any fossil fuels is certainly an impressive feat. The weather helped: sunny, breezy days optimized energy-collection and mild temperatures didn’t strain the … Continued
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Tech News
Watch How You’ll Soon Pay Your Subway Fare With a Tap of Your Phone
It’s a dream of busy transit riders to be able to quickly and conveniently pay fares with the one thing that we always seem to have handy—our phones. In today’s Android Pay demo at Google I/O, we got to see the experience that will soon be reality for Tube-riding Londoners. As part of Android Pay’s … Continued
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Tech News
Google Patented a Sticky Car Hood That Traps Pedestrians Like Flies
Google loves to brag about how its self-driving cars have the ability to save lives by being really good at not crashing into things. But crashes do still happen, and when they do, Google apparently has a backup plan: human flypaper. Yesterday, Google was awarded a patent that proposes placing a strong adhesive on the … Continued
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Tech News
Google Says It’s Just Too Hard to Come Up With a Name For Android N
Nougat. Nutter Butter. Nutella. Nope. Google just can’t think of a good “n” name for the latest version of Android, so Google wants us to come up with it. What? Google wants us to search for something? Come on, people, let’s give them some good options. For inspiration, here are all the other dessert-inspired names … Continued
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Tech NewsHow Sweden Is Relocating an Entire City
Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden, is sinking. In fact, by 2050, most of its structures will have collapsed into the iron mines below it. So engineers have embarked upon an ambitious project to move Kiruna—along with its 20,000 residents—two miles to the east. A new documentary explains exactly how they plan to do it. … Continued
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Tech News
Thanks TSA: Airport Security Lines Are Now 3 Hours Long [Updated]
Flying this week might make you reconsider your decision to ever leave home. While the federal government scrapes together the cash to hire the 6,000 new TSA workers needed to get the airline industry through the summer travel season, airports are telling passengers to suck it up and wait. And wait. And wait. Why are … Continued
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Tech NewsEl Niño Gives California Crabs
This year’s monster El Niño is truly a monster—it’s been blamed for killing coral reefs. Add another die-off to the list: Southern California beaches are blanketed in hundreds of thousands of tiny crabs. So many that it’s turning the beaches red. Pleuroncodes planipes, or tuna crabs (although they’re not true crabs, they’re actually lobsters), are … Continued
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Tech News
I Want to Live in This Incredibly Detailed Model of NYC
At first glance, it’s hard to discern whether these images of New York City are a super-stylized map, digital 3D-rendering, or perhaps simply a cute New Yorker illustration. In fact, they’re photographs of a 1:1200 scale model of the city housed in the Queens Museum. The photographs are part of a series named New York, … Continued
Alissa Walker
Alissa Walker's posts