A 107-meter-long wind turbine blade has arrived in the U.K. for testing. In an announcement Thursday, the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult said the blade would be tested at facilities in Blyth, Northumberland.
The blade, from LM Wind Power, is designed to be used on GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X 12 MW turbine, which will have a capacity of 12 megawatts and a height of 260 meters once fully assembled.
As the baseball playoffs start, Architectural Digest reviews a book on stadiums
Like nature itself—but unlike, say, football—baseball has no fixed boundaries. Beyond the right angles of the infield, it occupies a theoretically limitless space whose main constraint, in the pre-suburban-stadium era, was the surrounding real estate. This called forth some creative architectural solutions to achieve maximum seating capacity, optimal sight lines, and enough distance to the outfield fence to create a meaningful distinction between a pop fly and a home run.
Mostly, these efforts fell short, in part because the laws of physics do not easily allow for a second tier of grandstands without supporting columns that interfere with the view from the lower deck. Goldberger is good on the ingenuity that was applied to fit Wrigley (and Boston’s Fenway Park, Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, and Detroit’s Tiger Stadium) into their eccentric lots. He is meticulous about details such as the commodious ramps in the original Yankee Stadium that allowed more than 60,000 attendees at its first opening day to exit the stands in just 11 minutes. He dwells, perhaps a touch more than necessary, on the facades, materials, colors, and decorative touches of what are, for the most part, utilitarian structures that are occupied, for a few hours at a time, 80 or so days a year.
Hard to believe but the TSA reports wait times have improved in many major US airports
The LA Times reports one reason why
At LAX, for example, Delta, United and American have paid to install a total of 30 new automated screening lanes that use multiple conveyor belts to allow up to five passengers to simultaneously unload bags, shoes and clothes into bins to be screened. Airline officials say the lanes can make screenings up to 30% faster. The lanes cost just under $900,000 each.
Such lanes are being used in airports across the country, but LAX has the greatest number of automated screening lanes in the nation.
For anyone who frequents airport hotels, one of your biggest frustrations may be locating (or waiting for) the complimentary shuttle to a given property. You may frantically rush outside only to stand outside for 20 minutes — sweating or shivering — when you could’ve casually grabbed a snack or cup of coffee en route to your designated pick-up location. In some cases, travelers may forgo the free ride entirely and order an Uber or Lyft instead of attempting to deal with the headache.
Sensing these woes, one major program is moving in a direction to remove this confusion. As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Marriott is now offering shuttle tracking at 15 of its hotels, with plans to roll out the availability to 200 total by year end. The new feature — which can be accessed via the Marriott app — offers patrons the ability to see exactly where a shuttle is located as well as its estimated arrival time and distance.
The synthetic biology revolution isn’t just about what scientists can do, but how they can do it. The growing use of automation at a biotech company like Ginkgo is an example of a trend called “deskilling.” With each passing year, the scientific expertise needed to pull off a specific experiment in synthetic biology falls. What might have recently required the hard work of a postdoctoral student can now be done by undergraduates, and might soon show up in an ambitious high school student’s science fair project. Synthetic biology is getting easier, faster and cheaper, which means more and more people can do it. And as it does, the information hazard—the risk that comes from the dissemination of potentially dangerous knowledge—accumulates.
Deskilling has helped Ginkgo design and produce more than 10,000 genes per month, as synthetic biology shifts from an artisanal practice carried out in the laboratory by highly trained experts to a real industry. Everything is sped up, allowing researchers to design an organism, build it, test it, analyze the test and then start the whole cycle over and over again. “Things that would have made a great PhD thesis a few years back can now be done by people in two weeks here,” Ms. Agapakis said.
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