To Secure the Grid, Use a Darknet and Quantum Encryption
At least that’s what some scientists think the government should do. Utility Dive reports that during a Senate committee meeting last week, Richard Raines from Oak Ridge, one of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, urged lawmakers to direct funding into a Darknet project. The work essentially seeks to take the control systems of America’s power grids off of the public Internet and put them onto an independent network. https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download
How to Design Streets for Humans—and Self-Driving Cars
Urban planners talk about two visions of the future city: heaven and hell. Hell, in case it's not clear, is bad—cities built for technologies, big companies, and vehicles instead of the humans who actually live in them. And hell, in some ways, is here. Today's US cities are dominated by highways there were built by razing residential neighborhoods. Few sidewalks and fewer bike lanes. It's all managed by public policies that incentivize commuting in your car. Alone. Trapped in
Researchers Use Recycled Plastic To Create Super Strong Concrete
Discarded plastic bottles could one day be used to build stronger, more flexible concrete structures, from sidewalks and street barriers, to buildings and bridges, according to a new study. MIT undergraduate students have found that, by exposing plastic flakes to small, harmless doses of gamma radiation, then pulverizing the flakes into a fine powder, they can mix the irradiated plastic with cement paste and fly ash to produce concrete that is up to 15 percent stronger than c
Google parent Alphabet is building a model smart city — but will people want to live there?
High rents. Long commutes. Crowds, pollution and traffic. Is this your experience of city living? From e-bikes to congestion charges and from pop-up urinals to outdoor gyms, experts have spent decades trying to improve the quality of life in our cities. Now the company that owns Google has chosen the quayside area in Toronto — one of the largest underdeveloped urban spaces in North America — to start over and build a “smart city” from scratch. https://medium.com/world-economi
How Australia's A$49bn internet network came to be ridiculed
In 1872, rugged, frontier Australia was lauded for overcoming the tyranny of distance to connect itself to the world via the "bush telegraph", a two-year project stringing 3,200km (2,000 miles) of wire through the outback that became part of the nation's folklore. By contrast today, while striving to be seen as an "innovation nation", Australia stands condemned, even ridiculed, for its latest drive for connectivity: a modern, fast internet network. http://www.bbc.com/news/wor