News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Earthquakes are getting deeper at the same rate as the wastewater sinks.

Researchers have developed a new computer model for calculating the water content of snowpacks, providing an important tool for water resource managers and avalanche forecasters as well as scientists.

Pavements, which are vulnerable to increased temperatures and excessive flooding due to sea level rise, can crack and crumble. Climate change can be a major contributor and as greenhouse gas emissions continue these issues are projected to accelerate. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire say because of this one of the best ways to extend the life cycle of roads, and keep future costs down, is to increase the thickness of asphalt on certain roads.

A new Empa study shows how much work still lies ahead of us if Switzerland is to do without fossil fuels in the future. There are two possible solutions: storing large amounts of energy in summer and limiting our demand in winter, or generating energy in the "sunny south" or "windy north" of the world and transporting it here. The Empa researchers see their study as a thought-provoking impulse for politics and society.

Researchers have limited access to information about how people use popular ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft. But recent analysis of aggregate data about ridesharing trips in New York City, conducted by researchers at UConn and published last month in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, sheds new light on use of the service by people in the city's outer borough neighborhoods.

Human waste might be an unpleasant public health burden, but scientists at the University of Illinois see sanitation as a valuable facet of global ecosystems and an overlooked source of nutrients, organic material and water.

Automatic landings have long been standard procedure for commercial aircraft. While major airports have the infrastructure necessary to ensure the safe navigation of the aircraft, this is usually not the case at smaller airports. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and TU Braunschweig have now demonstrated a completely automatic landing with vision assisted navigation that functions properly without the need for ground-based systems.

For more than a billion people around the world, running water comes from water systems that turn on and off at certain times. A new paper by University of Toronto Engineering professor David Taylor proposes a model to explain why and how these systems come to be -- and how they fit into meeting international targets for human development and safe drinking water.

To meet internationally agreed-upon climate targets, the world's industrial nations will need to retire fossil fuel-burning energy infrastructure ahead of schedule, according to a new study in Nature from the University of California, Irvine and other institutions.