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+13 +1
The Hail Mary Plan to Restart a Hacked US Electric Grid
In his years-long career developing software for power grids, Stan McHann had never before heard the ominous noise that rang out last Wednesday. Standing in the middle of a utility command center, he flinched as a cyberattack tripped the breakers in all seven of the grid's low voltage substations, plunging the system into darkness. "I heard all the substations trip off and it was just like bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam," McHann says. "The power’s out. All you can do is say, OK, we have to start from scratch bringing the power back up. You just take a deep breath and dig in."
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+20 +1
Chinese billionaire Jack Ma says the US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure
Alibaba founder Jack Ma fired a shot at the United States in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Ma was asked by CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin about the U.S. economy in relation to China, since President-elect Donald Trump has been talking about imposing new tariffs on Chinese imports. Ma says blaming China for any economic issues in the U.S. is misguided. If America is looking to blame anyone, Ma said, it should blame itself.
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+24 +1
Deadly Hepatitis A Outbreaks Are Exposing Crumbling U.S. Public Health Infrastructure
Kristi Haynes knew she had a problem when her eyes turned the color of traffic paint. Haynes had been feeling strangely tired, but she didn’t have many opportunities to look at herself in a mirror because she’d been homeless for a few months. Her fiance noticed her yellow eyes and freaked out. And that’s how Haynes knew she had caught the disease so many of her friends already had: hepatitis A.
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+2 +1
The battle for the future of Stonehenge
Britain’s favourite monument is stuck in the middle of a bad-tempered row over road traffic
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+11 +1
Improving infrastructure could save trucking billions of gallons of fuel
Improvements to our nation’s highway infrastructure can help conserve fuel and reduce emissions, according to a case study released by the American Transportation Research Institute this week. Nationally, congestion is estimated to have increased the trucking industry’s fuel consumption by 6.87 billion gallons in 2016; adding an additional $15.74 billion to its fuel bill.
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+23 +1
Report Finds More Than 47,000 'Structurally Deficient' Bridges In The U.S.
The collapse of a bridge earlier this week in Tennessee is raising new alarms about the delicate state of infrastructure across the U.S. Tennessee Department of Transportation engineers say that a concrete overpass spanning an interstate highway in Chattanooga fell when a truck carrying an oversize load hit the bottom of the bridge and sliced through steel beams underneath. One person driving underneath the bridge was injured, police say.
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+20 +1
From ruined bridges to dirty air, EPA scientists price out the cost of climate change
By the end of the century, the manifold consequences of unchecked climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to a new study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Those costs will come in multiple forms, including water shortages, crippled infrastructure and polluted air that shortens lives, according to the study in Monday’s edition of Nature Climate Change. No part of the country will be untouched, the EPA researchers warned.
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+14 +1
Climate change could damage thousands of U.S. bridges, engineers say
Bridges built after World War II are susceptible to temperature variations, making them more likely to fail because of climate change, two civil engineers have found. Drastic fluctuations in climate, often blamed on humans, could cause significant deterioration to tens of thousands of steel-girder bridges across the United States, a study from Colorado State University civil engineers Susan Palu and Hussam N. Mahmoud concluded.
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+16 +1
With fewer cars on US streets, now is the time to reinvent roadways and how we use them
Sticking closer to home because of COVID-19 has shown many people what cities can be like with less traffic, noise, congestion and pollution. Roads and parking lots devoted to cars take up a lot of land. For example, in Phoenix, Los Angeles and New York City these spaces account for over one-third of each city’s total area.
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+16 +1
Bathroom Reading
The pandemic has helped expose an urgent problem—the widespread lack of public washrooms. Rose Hendrie on where we can and cannot go.
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+10 +1
Amtrak Names Seimens Mobility Preferred Bidder For New Train Equipment
California-based Siemens Mobility will be the new builder of trainsets for Amtrak, according to the railroad.
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+17 +1
Demand for water is rapidly increasing as supply dwindles
Limited access to clean water remains a struggle for millions of Americans. And lack of water access is expected to become an even greater problem in the coming years across the U.S. and around the world.
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+16 +1
How Ford burned $12 billion in Brazil
A century ago Henry Ford came to Brazil and established the town of Fordlandia, hoping to become an Amazonian rubber baron, but retreated deep in the red.
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+3 +1
What Chinese corner-cutting reveals about modernity
In our apartment in central Beijing, we fight a daily rearguard action against entropy. The mirror on my wardrobe came off its hinges six months ago and is now propped up against the wall, one of many furnishing casualties. Each of our light fittings takes a different bulb, and a quarter of them are permanently broken. In the bedroom, the ceiling-high air-conditioning unit runs its moisture through a hole knocked in the wall, stuffed with an old cloth to avoid leakage, while the balcony door, its sealant rotted, has a towel handy to block the rain when it pours through.
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+13 +1
Florida condo building deemed unsafe, evacuation ordered
The city of North Miami Beach has ordered the evacuation of a condominium building after a review found unsafe conditions
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+21 +1
At least 8 dead in hotel collapse in China's Suzhou
BEIJING: At least eight people have died and nine were missing in a hotel collapse in Suzhou city in eastern China, said authorities on Tuesday ...
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+15 +1
Infrastructure deal will spend billions targeting climate change
With extreme weather disasters making headlines almost daily this summer, Congress appears ready to start spending billions of dollars to fight climate change. The bipartisan infrastructure deal currently making its way through the U.S. Senate includes notable first steps meant to address the climate crisis, including billions for flood control, fire prevention and sea-level-rise mitigation.
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+19 +1
El Salvador's bitcoin experiment is a warning to other countries
The impoverished country's vaunted adoption of bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday was marred by street protests, technical glitches and an extreme drop in the value of the controversial digital currency.
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+15 +1
Why Tesla Soared as Other Automakers Struggled to Make Cars
The yawning disparity between the performance of the electric car company and established automakers last year reflects the technological change roiling the industry. For much of last year, established automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor operated in a different reality from Tesla, the electric car company.
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+16 +1
The secret MVP of sports? The port-a-potty
It's not the most glamorous side of sports, but most game days simply couldn't happen without portable toilets and the people who maintain them. We look at how the stalwart stalls have helped bring fans closer to the game.
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