Breaking News: National Infrastructure

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

Houston – HARC releases an interactive data analysis to visualize and articulate Winter Storm Uri's effect.

• share
• favorite_border

Research begun at the Department of Energy’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research and continued at spinoff company Form Energy may launch a new era of renewable energy.

• share
• favorite_border

Shortages of personal protective equipment, dairies pouring milk down the drain and delivery delays of online purchases are examples of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the supply chain. In response, a new report provides recommendations for government policy makers to address these challenges.

• share
• favorite_border

March Science Snapshots from Berkeley Lab

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists at Argonne developed a climate model that projects future conditions at neighborhood-level scale across the entire United States to help PG&E plan for extreme weather events in California.

• share
• favorite_border

The Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) at the University of Utah is pleased to announce it has chosen 17 project selectee applications for negotiations for the FORGE Solicitation 2020-1. The selectees could receive a combined total of up to $46 M over the next 3 years.

• share
• favorite_border

Debra Laefer of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Rae Zimmerman of NYU Wagner win a national competition to drive research and collaborative action in urban resiliency and smart and connected communities. Their project aims to bolster the ability of NYC to respond to crises and disasters.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

While frozen wind turbines underperformed during the Texas power grid failure, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) around 29,000 megawatts of thermal energy — which is sourced from coal, gas and nuclear plants — were missing from the grid.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

On Tuesday in an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Texas Governor Greg Abbott blamed the outages on wind turbines and on the "Green New Deal." Rolling blackouts have ravaged Texas after a winter storm created a sudden spike in energy demand and hamstrung production of natural gas, coal, nuclear, and wind energy.

• share
• favorite_border

As Hurricane Dorian raged through the Bahamas, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory worked around the clock to aid recovery efforts for one of the Caribbean’s worst storms ever, providing geographic data that guided decisions on everything from where to open emergency shelters to how to staff first-aid centers.

• share
• favorite_border

Research co-authored by University of California scientists has found that by 2050, as many as 24,500 affordable housing units in the United States are projected to be exposed to coastal flooding.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers in Poland have created smart road signs that use built-in Doppler radar, video, and acoustic radar and weather stations to monitor road traffic and conditions to warn drivers in real-time of hazards and prevent collisions on highways. During the 179th ASA Meeting, Dec. 7-10, Andrzej Czyzewski will describe his applied research project to develop autonomous road signs with built-in acoustic radar devices.

• share
• favorite_border

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass the Great American Outdoors Act. The legislation will definitively fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).

• share
• favorite_border

St. Louis was selected as the site for the first SCIRA exercise. The pilot program brought together first responders, city managers and other stakeholders, and through a series of realistic disaster scenarios, demonstrated how smart city technology can transform municipal emergency response.

• share
• favorite_border

“In many states, traffic appears to be a leading indicator, increasing first, with COVID-19 cases rising after a delay of up to 11 days,” said Northern Arizona University professor Kevin Gurney, head of the NAU research group analyzing the data. Pawlok Dass, a postdoc in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, is the lead research scientist on the project.

• share
• favorite_border

Newswise Live Expert Panel for May 7, 2020: Food Security, Supply Chains, Meat Shortages

• share
• favorite_border

More than 2000 renewable energy facilities are built in areas of environmental significance and threaten the natural habitats of plant and animal species across the globe.

• share
• favorite_border

In the fall of 2019, Moldova needed to identify viable alternative routes and sources of natural gas in the event of a disruption in natural gas supply to the country during the 2019-2020 winter. Through the U.S. Department of Energy-led Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC), experts from Argonne and the U.S. Government provided assistance to Moldova in developing a plan to prepare and respond to the potential supply disruptions.

• share
• favorite_border

Global risk management experts are calling for fire education initiatives to be included in driver safety programs so that drivers are better prepared for an emergency if faced with it on the roads.

• share
• favorite_border

An international team of geoscientists led by Caltech has used fiber optic communications cables stationed at the bottom of the North Sea as a giant seismic network, tracking both earthquakes and ocean waves.

• share
• favorite_border

Using remarkably resilient carbon fiber fabrics, panels and wraps, CatStrong has successfully restored more than 35 bridges.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

How risky is travel in the U.S.? It gets tricky. Despite a lot of research on the dangers of traffic injury and death, there’s a lack of clarity on the role of the built environment (roadway designs and adjoining development) and its risk effects. Before we can know how risky a given built environment is, we have to know how many people are traveling there, and in many cases, for pedestrians and cyclists, this data is not available.

• share
• favorite_border

Okamoto and a group of biologists, mathematicians, social scientists, resource managers and representatives of indigenous cultures have created tools that look at the social and cultural costs and benefits of different management strategies used to protect and recover fisheries.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

How does ice form? Surprisingly, science hasn’t fully answered that question. Differences in ice formation on various surfaces still aren’t well understood, but researchers today will explain their finding that the arrangements that surface atoms impose on water molecules are the key.

• share
• favorite_border

New research shows that visitors to urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than before their visit—and that their elevated mood lasts for up to four hours. The effect is so strong that it’s equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas, the happiest day each year on Twitter. With increasing urbanization and mood disorders, this research may have powerful implications for public health and urban planning.

• share
• favorite_border

Northern Arizona University professors Eck Doerry and Ben Ruddell are collaborating with water engineers in the city of Phoenix and Flagstaff for a pilot program that uses traffic cameras and crowd-sourced data to track and predict flooding during monsoon season.

• share
• favorite_border

South Dakota State University researchers will develop innovative techniques to repair and construct bridges and roadways through a new U.S. Department of Transportation-funded research center.

• share
• favorite_border

As the summer months heat up, so will the asphalt and other materials used to make roads. Pavements, which are vulnerable to increased temperatures and excessive flooding due to sea level rise, can crack and crumble. Climate change can be a major contributor and as greenhouse gas emissions continue, which scientists say have caused an increase in global temperatures since the mid-20th century, these issues are projected to accelerate. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire say because of this one of the best ways to extend the life cycle of roads, and keep future costs down, is to increase the thickness of asphalt on certain roads.

• share
• favorite_border

Engineers at the University of New Hampshire have designed a unique living laboratory on a heavily traveled iconic bridge which could change the way infrastructure is viewed. The Memorial Bridge, which links Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine, has been outfitted with data sensors that have transformed it into a self-diagnosing, self-reporting “smart” bridge that captures a range of information from the health of the span to the environment around it.

• share
• favorite_border

Heidi Feigenbaum, a professor at Northern Arizona University, received a $544,758 grant from the U.S. Department of the Army to develop a mathematical model that will more accurately predict how the materials in bridges, pipes and other infrastructure will react to stressors with the goal of building safe and cost-effective projects.

• share
• favorite_border

As more rain falls on a warming planet, a new computer model shows that it may not take a downpour to cause widespread disruption of road networks. The model combined data on road networks with the hills and valleys of topography to reveal “tipping points” at which even small localized increases in rain cause widespread road outages.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

A new deep-mapping computer model can detect visual changes to individual properties, allowing researchers to more-rapidly track gentrification within neighborhoods and cities, according to a study published March 13, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lazar Ilic, Michael Sawada, and Amaury Zarzelli of the University of Ottawa, Canada.

• share
• favorite_border

The products of wastewater treatment have been found to contain trace amounts of antibiotic resistant DNA. These products are often reintroduced to the environment and water supply, potentially resulting in the spread of antibiotic resistance.

• share
• favorite_border

False alarm text message made residents of Hawaii check what others were doing to verify risk

• share
• favorite_border

Students to build sustainable home of healing for military veterans for U.S. Department of Energy contest; UNLV competed in 2013 and 2017.

• share
• favorite_border

HARC released a special report today for public and private sector leaders that addresses how to fund critical infrastructure required to maintain the safety and well-being of cities and communities. The Green Paper is entitled “Funding Resilience in the Greater Houston Region: Synopsis from a Public-Private Sector Workshop.”

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

A Mississippi State civil engineering faculty member who researches resilience against extreme events and natural hazards is responding to lessons learned from California’s deadly Camp Fire by outlining how to utilize the power of data to improve disaster response and minimize economic loss and human harm in similar events.

• share
• favorite_border

A field work study of four bridges in Denver, Colorado was conducted to assess the behavior of prestressed concrete bridges carrying light rail transit loadings.

• share
• favorite_border

In her new book, Kathryn Rogers Merlino, University of Washington associate professor of architecture, argues for the environmental benefit of reusing buildings rather than tearing them down and building anew.