Land
Just Way Too Much Rain
North America's Pacific Northwest was on the receiving end of a incredibly large amount of rain recently - and while it caused some flooding and even some tornadoes across the whole region, British Columbia really got hit very hard.
A lot of the more rural roads in BC are carefully threaded through its mountainous landscape, which suffered a large number of wildfires this summer. When mountainous landscapes meet torrential rain - especially if all the trees have been burned away - landslides and mudslides result, and roads tend not to like those.
It's so bad, in fact, that Vancouver was completely cut off from the rest of Canada, and there are several towns and villages in the interior of BC that are totally isolated too. Efforts are underway to fix the roads that "just" have tons of mud and rocks on them, but some of them are in really bad shape and will need significant earthworks to fix - not easy now winter is around.
When The Leaning Tower Is Not In Pisa
What is actually happening when you build a brand new tower and it starts to lean? This article digs into the events surrounding the fated Millenium Tower in San Francisco - initially sold as an ultra-luxurious place for the very wealthy, but which quickly turned into lawsuits flying everywhere as it started to tilt.
It turns out that soil engineering is tricky stuff, and it's very city-dependent - building skyscrapers in London, for example, is different as you can create giant basements that "float" the buildings in the clay, whereas in somewhere like Miami you can build directly on the limestone - though in that case, you might need actual floats, as it's so porous that rising sea levels will come straight up through it.
How Many AA Batteries Does It Take To Get There?
Trains. They're cool, they're fun, and they're good for the environment - especially if they run on electricity rather than diesel. But giving trains power requires stringing up overhead wires, or building a third rail, with regular substations along the way... or does it?
Battery-powered trains have been talked about for passenger services for some time now - especially on small branch lines - but there's now talk of them taking on freight too, since adding a giant boxcar full of batteries really doesn't make a big difference to a giant freight train.
One interesting note near the bottom, too, is the ability to move these trains to areas that need emergency power after disasters and hooking them up to the power grid - something that the Canadians already have some practice with.
Too Late For Toilets?
The US has a problem. No, not that one. Or that one. Well, it has lots, but one that's been silently getting worse is the sheer lack of public restrooms/toilets that are available.
Walk around almost any big US city and you'll notice it eventually - there's almost nowhere to go. Your best bet is to find a private business, and even then, they're closing theirs off too.
What's behind this? A whole host of reasons, though often the finger is pointed at how costly they are to maintain and keep clean, especially as the US' lack of social support and rising housing costs are causing a spiraling homelessness issue.
There's some potential solutions - including fully automated, self-cleaning options - but I just hope they get some traction, and don't run into that weird American problem where all infrastructure costs about ten times more to build than it should.
Sea
I Like Big Ships And I Cannot Lie
This article is an interesting deep dive into the current state of the shipping industry - and why big container ships aren't necessarily the big efficiency gains you think they are.
In fact, the article posits that they may actually be a problem - not only causing spikier loads, because ports have to cope with so much cargo in a short space of time, but also making the market more anti-competitive, as it means it's basically impossible to enter the space as a new cargo line.
There's some more deep diving into the history of the industry and how contracts are drawn up versus how they used to - it's a fascinating dive into shipping if you're after a longer read.
Oh Yeah This Railway Is Totally Legit
Let's say you want to ship a load of seafood domestically within the USA. The only problem is that you don't want the expense of running a US-flagged ship with all of their regulations and rules, but the damn Jones Act says that only US ships can do domestic movement of food.
But wait! There's a clause that says cargo that goes via a Canadian railway is exempt. Of course, this is intended for normal freight trains, but what if, instead, you just took the cargo, ran it up and down a tiny railway that's technically in Canada, and then moved it on its merry way? That works, right?
Well, based on the large amount of penalties headed towards American Seafoods Company, no, it doesn't. It's a wonderfully silly idea, though.
Space
The Only Downside Is The Rockets Getting Very Dizzy
If I asked you to think of how to launch things into space, you probably first think of a rocket. Rule that out, and maybe you'd have a go at a giant cannon, or high-speed cable winch up a mountain, or something. What don't I think of? Launching it out of a giant centrifuge.
Yet, somehow, the aptly named SpinLaunch is apparently well on the way to making it work. A gigantic, sixteen-story high, vacuum-sealed centrifuge managed to fling a payload a casual several thousand kilometres per hour as part of a test, and got it up to tens of thousands of feet. And this is only a third the size of the final one and only at 20% power, apparently.
Of course, getting into orbit is mostly about going sideways rather than going up, which is why the final design will have a rocket that kicks in once it's above a majority of the atmosphere, but this basically lets you save the entire first stage of most normal rockets if it works. Just... don't expect to launch anything living in this thing.
Please, Think Of The Kessler Syndrome
In something that's a bit too close to the Cold War for my comfort, Russia were clearly feeling a bit too bored last week as they decided to blow up a defunct satellite as part of testing their new anti-satellite weaponry.
The problem with blowing up defunct satellites is, of course, that you've now gone from one piece of space debris that's easy to track to thousands that are basically impossible to track. Even better? They did it uncomfortably near the orbit of the ISS.
Orbital velocities mean that even a collision with a flake of paint can put a huge hole in something, so the ISS astronauts had to take shelter in their vehicles several times as they got near the debris cloud.
Still no real apology out of the Russians, either. I, for one, would like to see all anti-satellite weapons limited by treaty to being a giant net with retrograde boosters attached.
Silicon
Maybe We Should Make Chips Too
After over a year of being brutally behind because they cancelled all their microchip orders at the start of the pandemic, car manufacturers in the US are now at the stage of saying "well, what if we made our own?"
Obviously, modern vehicles have a very large number of microchips in them, and shortages have pushed some waiting periods to over a year, and caused other models to start coming with features mysteriously removed.
If they can bring some more manufacturing onto US shores and get us away from almost all microchips coming from one of just three factories worldwide, that'd be great. Maybe replace some of those all-touchscreen interiors with real buttons while you're at it?
Industry
Clothes That Keep You Cold
Materials science is a fascinating and underappreciated field - especially when it gives us fabrics that seem to defy logic, like this new reflective fabric that works so well that it stays colder than the air around it, even when it's in direct sunlight.
This is done by embedding aluminium oxide nanoparticles into the fabric, which reflect most of the visible and infrared light right back to where it came from. It's apparently even durable after being washed, which would have been my first concern (as well as those nanoparticles leaching into the environment).
Materials that keep us cool in a warming world are unfortunately only getting more important, but passive cooling itself is an important part of fighting global warming. Similar technologies are being developed to keep buildings cool, too.
And Finally
It's A Crash A Minute
I have a deep love for crash testing facilities and the videos they produce, and this highlight reel from Texas A&M Transportation Institute is a real banger.
Barriers! Signs! Mailboxes! Mysteriously giant upright steel tubes! This one has it all.