The death toll from the collapse of a pedestrian bridge over a road at Miami’s Florida International University on March 15th has risen to at least six, with the university admitting on Saturday that one of the project engineers had waved off concerns over a crack just hours before.
The Puerto Rico Energy Commission has launched a probe into why its efforts to rebuild the commonwealth’s electrical grid after taking a direct hit from Hurricane Maria in September are proceeding so slowly, with less than even a third of the electrical grid back online to date.
If you’ve ridden the New York City subway, you know the feeling. You buy a flimsy plastic card that lets you ride the train, and when you try to swipe it at the turnstile, it doesn’t work. You swipe again. The machine asks you to swipe again. You swipe again. The machine asks you to swipe again at the same turnstile.…
Back in 2013, the sky was the limit for Tesla, and Elon Musk was promising a low-cost 90-second battery swap at charging stations in the future. Since then, reality has set in, and those plans seem to be on hold. What’s the next best solution for those long charging times? Maybe put your feet up and microwave a…
On Tuesday, The New York Times decided to reignite the age old debate of walking versus standing on escalators. And do you know what the paper concluded? “You shouldn’t walk on escalators.” This is a patently incorrect and essentially un-American conclusion for at least four reasons.
Midtown Manhattan—with its noise, traffic, slow-moving tourists, and overpriced everything—is the one place most New Yorkers avoid at all costs (if they can help it.) It’s also home to Trump Tower, a gargantuan gold-plated phallus jabbed straight into the city skyline where the President-elect is planning on spending…
In May 2013, a bridge spanning the Skagit River along Interstate 5 in Washington state catastrophically collapsed, after an oversized trailer clipped one of the bridge’s cross beams. A new analysis by engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign confirms the many factors that contributed to the…
Let’s state the obvious: trains in america are awful. They’re slow, expensive, and not very reliable. And there are a few, largely unsolvable reasons why that’s the case.
A crane collapsed across the span of New York’s Tappan Zee Bridge today, blocking traffic and wreaking havoc on the state’s longest bridge.
The smell hit me as soon as I opened my car door—like rancid milk mixed with dog shit. I gasped for breath as humid air descended, filling my pores with the putrid odor.
Last night, a DC subway station turned into a surprise water park ride. It wasn’t a huge deal—the station was closed for a few hours, the water drained, and service went back to normal—but it certainly looked like it. Seeing a timelapse of the whole thing from the station’s entrance shows how this happened.
China, conceiver of large, ambitious, and often terrifying new infrastructure projects, has decided to build another opportunity for its citizens to stare into the abyss of mortality very tall glass bridge, despite the fact that the last one wasn’t as strong as some people hoped.
After the full impact of the Flint water crisis was revealed, it was almost inevitable that more cities would start to see the same problems when it came to lead in their water supplies. Now it’s been proven that dozens of utilities are underreporting the amounts of lead in their water: 33 cities in the US have been…
After 17 years of construction, the Gotthard Base Tunnel opens today. This feat of engineering is a 35-mile high-speed rail connection beneath the Swiss Alps and is now the longest transit tunnel in the world. You better believe that Hyperloop engineers are paying attention.
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 catastrophic collapse of Washington State’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 launched intensive research into the aerodynamics of bridge design. Now a team of South Korean scientists have identified a geometric structure that can better withstand the complicated aerodynamic forces at play—and they found their…
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…
There are few things on this planet I hate more than bottled water. Just the crinkling sound of someone wrapping their mouth around one of those squeaky garbage accordions fills me with rage. I stopped drinking it a long time ago—and you should stop drinking it, too.
In March, Flint, Michigan began the seemingly impossible task of replacing the pipes that delivered lead-poisoned water to its citizens. I say “impossible” because there’s no real way for the city to know with absolute certainty which pipes need to go. A team of data scientists from Google and the University of…
