But Quayside’s newsworthy for another, more encouraging reason: The plan is to build the place, not out of concrete and steel, but wood—and wood is looking good. A recent advance in wood technology should interest the neighborhood’s developers: Teng Li, a University of Maryland mechanical engineer, created with his colleagues wood that’s as “strong as steel, but six times lighter,” he said. Liangbing Hu, Li’s co-author on the study, added, “This kind of wood could be used in cars, airplanes, buildings—any application where steel is used.” Making it is just a two-step process. The scientists first boiled natural wood in a mixture of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, to remove some of the lignin and hemicellulose, substances contained in the walls of wood cells (the former retard parasite and bacterial attacks, the latter cover and bind fibers). Then they put the wood in a hot press, which leads, as they say in the paper, “to the total collapse of cell walls and the complete densification of the natural wood with highly aligned cellulose nanofibres.” The result, they conclude, is a “low-cost, high-performance, lightweight alternative” to “most structural metals and alloys.”
Power plants will have to emit lower levels of smog on hot days, under new guidelines from the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
The regulations are aimed at the state’s oldest power plants, which emit levels of harmful nitrogen oxides that are at least 30 times higher than emissions from newer turbines, according to Gov. Cuomo’s office.
"While the Trump Administration continues its assault on protections that keep communities safe from harmful emissions, New York is once again taking aggressive action to protect public health and combat climate change,” Cuomo said in a Monday statement.
“These restrictions on dirty and inefficient power plants will improve air quality in overburdened communities and spur investments in the clean energy economy,” he added.
One possible explanation for the dramatic shift in racial attitudes in the last decade is that white Democrats who disagreed with the party's embrace of diversity have just abandoned the party altogether. But even though the makeup of the parties has fluctuated, that's not the only explanation; Researchers point to a genuine shift among the white liberals who have remained in the party.
Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
New cars and car loans are getting more expensive, but there may be a happy twist for car buyers. Automakers can't sell you enough, and if the economy takes a dip, they'll be very ready to deal.
U.S. light-vehicle sales through the third quarter were down 2 percent year over year, and many non-luxury automakers are struggling. When hot brands like Jeep and Subaru take dives of 13 and 9 percent in just September, you know something's off.
This totally makes sense. Cities with lots of air pollution are dark and dingy with buildings covered with black soot and gray and dingy skies. I think one of the reasons why crime has fallen in recent decades so much - murder after all is suicide by other means.
It’s a claim that’s more convincing given that the companies were convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolize bus and equipment sales to National City Lines. On a very basic level, a “conspiracy” was at the heart of the National City Lines business plan.