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."
The Tokyo Sky Tree, a broadcasting tower currently under construction in Tokyo's Sumida Ward, is now visible from various locations as it grows taller every day. The tower has already reached 300 meters high, and once completed, it will be the world's tallest self-standing tower at 634 meters."
IBM hopes that a new tool, called BigSheets, will help users analyze Web data more easily. The company has developed a test version of the software for the British Library."
Traditionally, the design of civil and mechanical load carrying structures involves the application of safety factors to cover the uncertainties on all kinds of parameters (load, material, geometry, boundary conditions, ...). A probalistic approach is used to define the safety factors.
The fuzzy finite element analysis (FFE) is a non-probalistic concept. This method is an extension of the Interval finite element analysis (IFE), which is based on an interval concept."
Were something like that 1700 quake to occur today — and it certainly could, seismologists say — enormous destruction and loss of life would result in a region that is home now to big cities and millions of people."
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