A lot of attention is paid to America's aging power infrastructure. As the 21st century continues on, and people purchase newer devices that demand more power from the grid, it's easy to miss another essential part of the power puzzle: the skilled technicians and engineers who make it all work. They're aging, and much like the parts of the grid they maintain, they'll need to be replaced in the thousands over the next decade.
Robotic cars that drive everyone around are a distant dream at best, but that hasn't stopped auto manufacturers from selling their whiz-bang appeal. In September it was Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, who teased a new "Super-Cruise" feature in the automaker's 2017 Cadillac model. A month later it was entrepreneur Elon Musk, who announced “Autopilot” in his company's upcoming “D series” Tesla S electric roadster.
Sandy crippled the NYC subway system this week, knocking out power, damaging switches, and dumping gallons of storm water into the city's aging tunnel infrastructure. Officials estimated that it would take several days for the subway to return to normal (some lines have already resumed service), and a 2011 study on similar disasters suggested it could take even longer, up to several months. A big part of the problem? Salt.
When the soon-to-be-defunct government of president Hosni Mubarak shut off Egypt's Internet early on the morning of January 28, 2020, it proved the US State Department's working theory: that the arc of history bends toward democracy, but it needs Internet access to get there. One project meant to ensure what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls "the freedom to connect" is an "Internet-in-a-suitcase," a kit of wireless routers and software that could be smuggled into an authoritarian country and allow revolutionaries to set up their own local area network (LAN) on the fly. Its developers at the public policy institute the New America Foundation call the concept "device as infrastructure," a platform that operates on its own, without requiring a connection to the broader Internet. By avoiding the traditional phone-company cables-and, in the process, a connection to the backbone of the Internet-this ad hoc network would be extremely difficult to monitor or shut down.
The perceived future of driving tends to revolve around a networked traffic infrastructure in which cars, traffic signals, and other roadway implements talk to each other electronically to optimise traffic flow and make driving more efficient all around. But MIT researchers think we can do many of these things on an existing network: the one that ties all of our smartphones together. A network of camera-equipped mobile devices mounted on dashboards could crowd source information about traffic signals and tell drivers what speed to maintain to avoid waiting at traffic lights. The idea stems from an already popular smartphone setup in which drivers perch their smartphones in dashboard brackets and use them as navigation devices. The MIT team built their SignalGuru app to take advantage of the camera on the other side of the phone by collecting stoplight data as cars drive around and feeding it back to a central system that then builds a larger picture of a city's traffic flow.
