It is a shock, then, to learn that they are banged out -- one piece at a time -- with a hammer you can buy at the Home Depot."
"We engineers and seismologists need to gather and study as much data as we can from Chile’s quake. But one thing is already clear: based on the kind of damage that buildings suffered in Chile, tall structures in the earthquake zones of the United States appear to be at much higher risk than we thought. This lesson should be of obvious concern to San Francisco and Los Angeles. But it is actually the Pacific Northwest that is most vulnerable to a mega-quake like Chile’s.
Just off Northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia sits the 600-mile-long Cascadia fault. Like the Nazca tectonic plate that caused the quake and tsunami in Chile, Cascadia can produce temblors with magnitudes of 9 or greater, more powerful than anything we’ve experienced or expect from California’s famous San Andreas fault."
"The wind industry may soon be dependent on a different kind of environmental awareness that has more to do with lasers than ecology. A new laser system that can be mounted on wind turbines allows them to prepare for the wind rushing toward their blades. The lasers act like sonar for the wind, bouncing off microscopically small particulates and back to a fiber optic detector. That data is fed to an on-board processor that generates a three-dimensional view of the wind speed and direction. Subtle adjustments in the turbine blade’s angle to the window allows it to capture more energy and protect itself in case of strong gusts."
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