Civil Engineering

Air Taxis Are Safe—According to the Manufacturers

IEEE Spectrum: ELECTRIC VERTICAL TAKE-OFF and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for urban commuting are currently under development by more than a dozen different companies. These concepts and prototypes, representing well over a billion dollars of venture capital investment in 2020 alone, promise…

To save forests, researchers are hooking trees up to Twitter

The Conversation: In July 2018, a century-old red oak went live on Twitter. The account @awitnesstree, tweeting from the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, introduces itself in its bio: Witnessing life as a tree in a changing environment for more than…

How 14 Microgrids Set Off a Chain Reaction in a Himalayan Village

IEEE Spectrum: Five years ago, the remote village of Lingshed in the Ladakh region of the northern Himalayas finally got electricity. A team of IEEE volunteers installed 14 solar-powered microgrids at the monastery and a nearby elementary school. The effort was…

You Can Measure This Fundamental Quantum Constant Using LEDs

Wired: Planck’s constant is one of the fundamental constants that sets up all the “rules” for how things work in our universe. (It’s named after the theoretical physicist Max Planck, who is best known for his work on quantized energy…