Informative headline, for those not wanting to figure out the wsj paywall:
>Faced with an influx of visitors, India's picturesque village of Jibhi has shut down the local liquor store and tried to restrict loud music, smoking and barbecues
Yes, the assisting crane is a mobile crane where the boom pivots up and down about the base. Some have booms that need to be disassembled piece-by-piece, so you just pivot it down until the top is resting on a flatbed trailer, then unbolt it.
These mobile cranes can reach just as high as tower cranes, but can't carry as much, can't reach out over the tops of buildings, and take up more room on the ground. Hence the need for tower cranes.
Hydro doesn't need pumping to provide load balancing. Just build more turbines [1] than you need for average load - then you can flow extra water overnight and less water during the day while keeping the average the same. This is then equal to the superposition of a traditional and PSH dam, but all in one footprint.
[1] Yes, extra turbines are expensive. But you'd need to build them anyways for a PSH facility.
The bridge looks to be precast concrete box-girders (hollow rectangular beams with plenty of steel reinforcement around the edges). The 'gravel' is the asphalt roadway (often this will be cast-in-place concrete) that's poured on top of the precast girders. The purpose of pouring the asphalt/concrete roadway on top is as a sacrificial wear element to prevent the structural beams being worn down by traffic.
Nah, the building is (mostly) just as good at the end of that time. It's just a convenience to make the probabilities easier to conceptualize. If we designed buildings such that the design earthquake had a 5e-6 daily chance of occurring, we'd just be confused.
Japan and California are pretty comparable in terms of science and engineering for earthquake resistance. There are some differences on the public policy side, which influence how the engineering requirements are implemented, but Japanese buildings are not intrinsically safer. Note that the 1994 Northridge (Calif.) and 1995 Kobe (Japan) earthquakes were about the same side - the Japanese quake was ~10x as costly and ~20x as deadly (mostly due to population density around the epicenters).
Current building codes are intended to design to a 10% probability of collapse in the "Maximum Considered Earthquake", which is roughly a 2475-year event. The 2475-year event has a 2% chance of occurring during the (assumed 50 year) lifetime of a building.
> 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA was changed due to his year in space
> Humans and chimps share 96% of the same DNA
Seeing as how Scott Kelly is not severely mutated (or dead, as the article says), this should be an indication that something is wrong with the reporting.
I think this idea that businesses are only allowed to have one revenue stream seems a bit strange. Other businesses that are supported by payments and ads include: magazines, cable TV, movie theaters, newspapers, public transit, air travel, and amusement parks. If Hulu thought that people would pay twice as much for ad-free content, then I'm sure they'd offer it.
>If Mr. Musk were somehow to increase the value of Tesla to $650 billion — a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible and would make Tesla one of the five largest companies in the United States, based on current valuations — his stock award could be worth as much as $55 billion
Except that as the article says, he already owns 20% of Tesla, so his current shares would rise in value by $110B. He could fail to meet any of performance targets and still be pulling in a billion dollars a year in capital gains.
>A single interrogator can cover some 40 kilometers of fiber, Biondi says, and monitor a virtual sensor every couple of meters.
Earthquake engineer here. This is the cool part. We've got plenty of data to detect and locate any given earthquake occurred. And we have maps that show approximately how hard the soil is under any given site. But the intensity that any building sees is still only known to +-50%, mostly due to variation in the subsurface conditions that we don't have enough resolution to model.
300 feet is awfully deep. If you believe that 300 feet of draft is needed to get the stability they need, then this seems like the only way to get it. There are no ports, or even semi-protected waters, where you could build, launch, or dock something like that without it running aground.
Some quick research shows that the deepest draft on oil platforms is in the range of 25m (1/4 of the FLIP ship), and further that this ship was built a decade before the development of floating oil platforms.
There is also a lot of more dangerous nuclear material scattered all over the country in bombs and power plants - none of which are designed to last more than a few decades. If society does collapse, and that collapse is not precipitated by total nuclear war, then it seems like the spent fuel won't even be the worst of the nuclear worries out there.
>Creating them, however, is a monumental task. There are more than four million miles of roads in the United States.
I assume that most passenger-miles are driven on <0.5MM miles of roads, moreso if they are marketing mainly to normal suburb-city commuters. And the advantage of self driving cars isn't really in the last mile. In my commuting days, I would have said
driving myself for 40 minutes <<< self driving car drives for 35 minutes and I drive for 5 < self driving car drives for 40 minutes
Your distance is off by quite a bit (should be ~1e11 m at closest approach).
The actual force is closer to 10^16 N. Which is big, but 10^7 weaker than the earth-sun interaction. But the sun has to move the earth by a couple AU per year whereas Mars has had a couple billion years to move it by the same amount.
Read more carefully - HR8799 is the subject of the animation up top, and the subject of the quote about motion interpolation. Both are credited to J. Wang, while the composite photo of Fomahault B is credited elsewhere. Also note the use of the term 'animation', and that he refers to images taken since 2009 (whereas the Fomahault B images start in 2004).
>Faced with an influx of visitors, India's picturesque village of Jibhi has shut down the local liquor store and tried to restrict loud music, smoking and barbecues