-
EartherSaudi Crown Prince Asks, Answers What if a City, But It’s a 105-Mile Line
Vicious Saudi autocrat Mohamed bin Salman has a new vision for Neom, his plan for a massive, $500 billion, AI-powered, nominally legally independent city-state of the future on the border with Egypt and Jordan. When we last left the crown prince, he had reportedly commissioned 2,300-pages’ worth of proposals from Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & … Continued
By Tom McKay -
Tech NewsReport: Saudi Prince’s Plan for Flying Taxi Robot City With ‘Giant Artificial Moon’ May Be Unrealistic
Sounds like notorious human rights abuser Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a massive new city of the future on the border with Egypt and Jordan is going just swell: According to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal, consultants hired to work on the Neom project built a list of ridiculous recommendations including “hologram … Continued
By Tom McKay -
EartherEarth ScienceNew Research Could Reveal Which Parts of Your City Swelter the Most
Anyone who’s spent time in a city in the summer knows that these bastions of blacktop get uncomfortably hot compared with the surrounding countryside. But even within a city’s bounds, some neighborhoods swelter more than others, and that can have a big effect on who’s most threatened by heatwaves. Which is why citizen scientists are … Continued
By Maddie Stone -
EartherConservationLawns Are an Ecological Disaster
Neil Tyson often conjectures that maybe aliens have concluded humans aren’t intelligent enough to contact. He’s probably referring to our capacity for war, but lawns may display our talent for fruitless carnage even better. Americans devote 70 hours, annually, to pushing petrol-powered spinning death blades over aggressively pointless green carpets to meet an embarrassingly destructive … Continued
Ian Graber-Stiehl -
EartherConservation
Good Urban Planning Could Mean Hotter Cities
Growing up around Washington, D.C., it’s a relief to now live in a city laid out in a coherent fashion, with numbered streets increasing along a cardinal directional axis and being intersected at sensible right angles. Which is why it pains me to say that physics brings some bad news for my fellow gridded city-dwellers: … Continued
By Maddie Stone -
EartherClimate ChangeThe Radical Plan to Cool Down LA as the World Heats Up
LOS ANGELES — It’s barely 10 a.m. on an August day in Hollywood, and the heat is already becoming oppressive. The temperature’s only in the mid-80s, but in the direct sun it feels hotter—and it’s getting worse by the minute. Part of the reason is the ground. The black asphalt of this side street off … Continued
Nate Berg -
Tech News
Hong Kong Looks Beautifully Uncanny When Seen From the Sky
Few cities represent the remarkable 20th century trend of skyscraper-filled, obscenely dense cities better than Hong Kong. At its height, The Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished in 1993, was perhaps the most dystopian portrait of urban living. And according to photographer Andy Yeung, 21st-century Hong Kong isn’t all that different. Yeung recently published his … Continued
-
Tech News
Megacities Will Gobble Up the Best Farmland, Leaving Humans Hungry
Cities will grow alongside growing populations, turning the land in their wake into housing and infrastructure. And when that happens, we can goodbye to the food, a new study warns. Urban populations are expected to nearly double from 2000 to 2030, and the total amount of urban land will triple to support the influx of … Continued
-
Tech NewsSploidWhy Are American Cities So Much Different Than European Cities?
European cities like Paris are much, much older than American cities like New York, and that age difference has led to many interesting differences in the layout of each city. For example, the wealthy population of America often live in suburbs away from the city while in Europe, the rich live inside the city. Why … Continued
By Casey Chan -
Tech News
New Clean Energy Report: America May Not Be Screwed After All
For the past sixteen months or so, it’s felt as though our planet has been shaking us by the shoulders, trying to wake us up to the fact that we’ve kicked the thermostat into overdrive. The good news is, America finally seems to be listening. According to a new report by the Department of Energy, … Continued
By Maddie Stone -
Tech News
How Olympians Can Survive Swimming in Sewage
Rio’s water is vile—full of raw sewage and dead bodies—and later this week, humanity’s top athletes will plunge into this hellish stew for a jolly ol’ international sporting competition. At this point, it’s too late for Brazil to properly clean up Rio’s befouled waterways for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Leaving spectators and athletes alike … Continued
By Maddie Stone -
Tech NewsThe App You’ve Never Heard of That’s Making Your City Better
In the 80s and 90s, the 911 system in the US became overloaded with people calling to report things like wayward couches and double-parked cars—not emergencies, yet situations where city officials could help. In 1996, Baltimore successfully tested a system that diverted these requests to a separate number. In 1997, the FCC reserved “311” as … Continued
-
Tech News
Riders of SF’s Tech Buses Would Prefer To Keep Their Commutes as Cushy as Possible
San Francisco needs help. It also needs to decide where to put bus stops for the hundreds of shuttle buses that creep through its streets, gathering wizened, under-caffeinated developers for their journeys to jolly Mountain View. A survey that asked for such logistical input provided some additional—and perhaps unsolicited—insight into these private transit experiences. SFist … Continued
-
Tech News
Hyperloop Connecting Helsinki and Stockholm Turns 300-Mile Trip Into 28 Minute Ride
Where will the first Hyperloop be? So far there are plans to use the tubular transportation system to move passengers in Slovakia and freight in Switzerland. But a proposed application for the Hyperloop announced today could solve a transportation conundrum that has been challenging planners for centuries: Connecting the neighboring nations of Sweden and Finland. … Continued
-
ScienceBiology
Turns Out, Hedgehogs Are At Home in Cities
Researchers at the University of Hamburg noticed that urban areas have higher populations of hedgehogs than rural areas, so they asked the question: what gives? It turns out these cute, little, pointy buggers are highly flexible and have adapted to humans living in their environments very well. Even when they were nesting next to populated … Continued
-
Tech NewsFatal Tesla Crash Proves Full Autonomy Is the Only Solution for Self-Driving Cars
The investigation into a death that occurred while a Tesla Model S driver was using Autopilot has filled the internet with dystopian-sounding headlines. Self-driving car driver died for the first time after crash in Florida. Self-driving Tesla was involved in fatal crash. But this was not a “self-driving car” that killed its “driver.” This was … Continued
-
Tech News
The Best and Worst Ideas from San Francisco’s Big Homelessness Project
You might have noticed an uptick of stories about the Bay Area’s homeless crisis in your social media feeds recently. Dozens of news organizations worked together to coordinate the publication of stories on homelessness today—all of which are mean to specifically focus on solutions for housing the region’s homeless population. Back in May a coalition … Continued
-
Tech News
Philly’s Beautiful Plan to Fight Crime with Neon Murals
Just the presence of streetlights can deter criminal behavior. A South Philadelphia neighborhood is trying something a little more innovative than that—using neon-lit murals to brighten the sidewalk and turn the area into a destination. Electric Street, by David Guinn and Drew Billiau, transforms a wall into a work of public art that not only … Continued
-
Tech News
Now Y Combinator Wants to Build a City Because Every Other Tech Company Is Doing It
Cities are so trendy right now that every big tech company wants to build its own. Zappos did it in Downtown Vegas. Amazon is kind of doing it in a Seattle. Alphabet is probably doing it somewhere soon. And now Y Combinator wants in on the fun, too, with a plan to build some kind … Continued
-
Tech News
Worried About Self-Driving Cars? Guess What—There’s Something You Can Do About That
For three years I’ve been writing at least once a week about self-driving cars and I’ve recently noticed a shift in popular opinion. The wide-eyed optimism of seeing Google’s cute-as-a-button robot bopping unassisted around a parking lot has been replaced by some ambiguous, malicious, unknowable entity, a shapeshifting Smoke Monster that ruins our lives and … Continued