Posts

March 12, 2013

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4:38 PM | The Decline of the Private Car

Emily Badger, reporting for the Atlantic Cities: “We’re probably closer to the end of the automobility era than we are to its beginning,” says Maurie Cohen, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “If we’re 100 years into the automobile era, it seems pretty [...]∞

March 07, 2013

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4:00 PM | ■ Can we please stop drawing trees on top of skyscrapers?

Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I’m not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, “Put a Bird On It“.¹ It turns [...]

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10:35 AM | Living (and Sometimes Dying) with Karst

The earth opened up and swallowed Jeff Bush last week. Normally, I wouldn’t use that phrase: people say it all the time when the earth has done no such thing. But in this case, it fits. A man went to his bedroom. The land fell away beneath him, and collapsed in on him, and he [...]

March 06, 2013

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8:15 PM | Patient Urbanism

Steve Mouzon: Building neighborhoods patiently requires far less debt for infrastructure and results in places that are more interesting than those that are built all at once. This was once the way we built everywhere, but it is now illegal all over. Why? Because cities insist on “seeing the end from the beginning,” meaning that [...]∞

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7:09 PM | A map of traffic congestion by metropolitan area

More people, more cars. Not a surprise. But you can see that congestion is worse in, say, the Washington, D.C., area than the New York metro area. New York has many more people, but also a better mass transit system. ∞∞

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5:43 PM | New Hampshire bill proposes aerial photography ban

AGBeat: Neal Kurk (R), member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives since 1986 has recently sponsored HB 619-FN to make aerial photography illegal in their state, which many are considering a look into the future. States are currently struggling with how to deal with advances in drone technology, particularly mini-drones, fueled by fears not [...]∞

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3:58 AM | Dynamic Coulee Landscape

The coulee environment is more fragile than you might expect, despite it’s ‘timeless’ look. We had a skiff of snow a week ago (a far cry from the blizzard we [...]

March 05, 2013

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10:00 PM | Shorts: The Man Behind the Maneuver

Until the 1970s, thousands of people choked to death -- leading to more accidental deaths than guns. But since then, thousands and thousands -- maybe even millions -- have been rescued by the Heimlich maneuver. Yet the story of the man who invented it may not have such a happy ending.

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8:56 PM | Why Are There So Many Sinkholes in Florida?

Rebecca J. Rosen, writing for the Atlantic Cities: Here’s what’s going on underground: the entirety of Florida sits on a bed of limestone, covered in varying degrees by composites of sand, clay, and soil. Limestone is soluble and porous, and over millions of years, acids in water have sculpted out a network of subsurface voids [...]∞

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6:25 PM | A plow, now!

Andy Woodruff at Bostonography: The city of Boston set up a web map that tracked the live location of snow plows and their ground covered, which would be excellent for a summary map, but in an excessive triumph the site was overloaded and had to be shut down because the demand was interfering with the [...]∞

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5:22 PM | Correlation of Population Density to Designated Urban Areas

Interesting article on determining population density through aerial photographs captured by drones. ∞∞

March 04, 2013

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6:40 PM | ■ An open letter to the New York Times

As a longtime reader and subscriber of the New York Times, I’m disgusted by the move to shut down the Green Blog. The closure of the environment desk a couple of months ago was frustrating, but I had hope that the Times would continue its coverage on the Green Blog. I should have known better. [...]

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5:18 PM | “An act of total cowardice”

The New York Times shut down their Green Blog on 5 pm last Friday (no doubt hoping that most people would forget by Monday). This follows the paper’s closure of their environment desk a few months ago. Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review, linked above, took the words right out of my mouth: Those [...]∞

March 01, 2013

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6:48 PM | Going Blind: The Coming Satellite Crisis

Yours truly, reporting for NOVA Next: Since the 1960 launch of TIROS, there has never been a moment when the U.S. hasn’t had a weather satellite in low Earth orbit. The latest is Suomi NPP, a next-generation satellite that was originally a testbed for advanced sensors and was only intended to last three years. Because [...]∞

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6:05 PM | NOVA Next

This is the other thing that’s been keeping me busy. This past October, I took a dream job at NOVA, the venerable PBS science show. Part of my position was to help build a brand new website, one focused on original, in-depth science reporting and opinion. It’s been a huge undertaking, and I’ve had lots [...]∞

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4:59 PM | Life at different densities in the anthropocene

Things have been a bit quiet here at Per Square Mile for the past week, and that’s in part because I had the good fortune to drop in Jon Christensen’s class at UCLA, “Environmental Communications in the Anthropocene” on Tuesday. Topics discussed ranged from graduate degrees to the origin story of Per Square Mile to [...]∞

February 28, 2013

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10:28 AM | Paricutín: “Save Me From the Dangers in Which I am About to Die”

Dionisio Pulido suddenly found himself having a very bad day. A few moments before, he had been living an ordinary life, clearing brush from his land while his helper plowed and his wife and son watched the sheep graze. Aside from the earthquakes that had driven the presidente of San Juan Parangaricutiro to send a [...]

February 26, 2013

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5:05 PM | Charlie LeDuff on going home to Detroit

Kai Ryssdal, reporting for Marketplace: “Detroit built the American way of life, it built the middle class,” said LeDuff. “Everything came out of coal and steel and rubber and cars — and it went away. And now we still have coherent car companies, but we don’t have the jobs, because those are gone. So what [...]∞

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6:32 AM | Robot Geologist on Mars Makes History

One small scoop full of powdered rock, one giant step forward for exogeology. Lovers of the good science of rock-breaking will find their breath catching at this image: That’s the first, folks. The first time we’ve ever drilled in to a rock on another planet. We’re doing geology with a robot on another world. Us. [...]

February 23, 2013

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9:01 PM | Government vs. the Public: Mind the Science Gap

Last fall I wrote a post about Canadian science communication, which got a lot of hits – for me, anyway. Some liked it, others hated it, and I suspect there [...]

February 22, 2013

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7:51 PM | Most remote permanent settlement on Earth

Tristan da Cunha, in the southern Atlantic Ocean. ∞∞

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6:26 PM | World Wildlife Federation turns to drones in bid to tackle poaching

James Halloway, writing for Ars Technica: With the grant money provided by Google over the course of three years, the WWF intends to expand its UAV operations, both technologically and geographically. To this end, the WWF is developing SMART—a marriage of UAVs, sensors, and software—which should allow authorities to tackle poaching more strategically and give [...]∞

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5:22 PM | Invisible Fences

Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh, writing for Venue: In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Venue met with Dean M. Anderson, a USDA scientist whose research into virtual fencing promises equally radical transformation—this time by removing the mile upon mile of barbed wire stretched across the landscape. As seems to be the case in fencing, a relatively [...]∞

February 21, 2013

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6:42 PM | To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns

Sabrina Tavernise, reporting for the New York Times: The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states, according to the Harvard center. The state-level data are too broad to tell whether [...]∞

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5:09 PM | Near Earth Orbit for Only $250 Per Week

Sarah Mitroff, reporting for Wired: [Peter] Platzer has engineered a tiny satellite called the ArduSat, which runs on several programmable Arduino computers, is equipped with a camera to take photos of the Earth, and uses an UHF transceiver to send and receive data. The finished ArduSat satellite is roughly the size of a water bottle, [...]∞

February 20, 2013

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7:23 PM | Open access publication bill before Congress

The U.S. House and Senate are considering bills that would mandate open access to scientific publications six months (at most) after they’ve first been published. Obviously, full open access would be ideal, but this is a step in the right direction. (Thanks to Richard Price.) ∞∞

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4:02 PM | China to tax carbon

Christopher Mims, writing for Quartz: Details on the carbon tax are scant, but previous reports indicated that it would come into force by 2015 and might start at 10 yuan ($1.60) per tonne of carbon, rising to 50 yuan ($8) per tonne by 2020. Notably, the tax would be collected by local tax authorities, and [...]∞

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11:58 AM | Parícutin: “Here Is Something New and Strange”

Imagine a pastoral scene, seventy years ago in Mexico. On a sunny February day, a woman and her son watch over their flock of sheep from the shade of oaks; her husband strides across his fields toward a pile of branches that need burning, while his helper completes a furrow. The oxen begin to turn; [...]

February 19, 2013

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10:00 PM | Speedy Beet

There are few musical moments more well-worn than the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. But, in this short, we find out that Beethoven might have made a last-ditch effort to keep his music from ever feeling familiar, to keep push his listeners to a kind of psychological limit.

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9:40 PM | Hives of Scum and Villany

Yours truly, writing for Wired Magazine: Luke Skywalker is a bumpkin. Before heading off to fight the Empire, he apparently never gets much farther than a country store that sells power converters. Over the course of three movies, his every foray into urban-ness strips away a layer of naïveté, shattering his innocence so utterly that [...]∞