How Engineers Are Building A New Railroad Under New York City

BY TIM DE CHANT

The biggest public transit infrastructure effort in the US is almost completely invisible — unless you’re 160 feet underground. The East Side Access project will connect the Long Island Railroad to New York’s Grand Central Terminal via a massive tunnel under the East River. Actually, that tunnel was the easy part; it was started in 1969. The hard part? “We are building a brand-new railroad here,” says Michael Horodniceanu, president of Metropolitan Transit Authority Capital Construction. When it’s finished in 2019, around 160,000 people will see shorter commutes. But before that, engineers must complete three tricky segments. Here’s how (and where) they’ll do it.

1. Grand Central Terminal
“We are a stealth project when we land in Manhattan,” Horodniceanu says. “No one really knows we are here.” His crews are carving out a terminal beneath Grand Central (above), where twin caverns 1,050 feet long will have eight separate platforms.

2. Northern Boulevard Crossing
To keep the soft ground from collapsing, engineers snaked coils of coolant through the soil to form a protective arch of frozen earth. That let crews work safely while traffic rumbled overhead. Cost: $1 million per foot.

3. The Harold Interlocking
The busiest rail junction in the nation can’t stop for construction. As trains lumber through, crews have been boring the main tunnel below, rerouting and fixing cable and wire as they go. Work there, Horodniceanu says, “is like a dance.”

The Portable X-Ray

The hand-held scanners, or tricorders, of the Star Trek movies and television series are one step closer to reality now that a University of Missouri engineering team has invented a compact source of X-rays and other forms of radiation. The radiation source, which is the size of a stick of gum, could be used to create inexpensive and portable X-ray scanners for use by doctors, as well as to fight terrorism and aid exploration on this planet and others.

“Currently, X-ray machines are huge and require tremendous amounts of electricity,” said Scott Kovaleski, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. “In approximately three years, we could have a prototype hand-held X-ray scanner using our invention. The cell-phone-sized device could improve medical services in remote and impoverished regions and reduce health care expenses everywhere.”

Kovaleski suggested other uses for the device. In dentists’ offices, the tiny X-ray generators could be used to take images from the inside of the mouth shooting the rays outward, reducing radiation exposure to the rest of the patients’ heads. At ports and border crossings, portable scanners could search cargoes for contraband, which would both reduce costs and improve security. Interplanetary probes, like the Curiosity rover, could be equipped with the compact sensors, which otherwise would require too much energy.

The accelerator developed by Kovaleski’s team could be used to create other forms of radiation in addition to X-rays. For example, the invention could replace the radioactive materials, called radioisotopes, used in drilling for oil as well as other industrial and scientific operations. Kovaleski’s invention could replace radioisotopes with a safer source of radiation that could be turned off in case of emergency.

“Our device is perfectly harmless until energized, and even then it causes relatively low exposures to radiation,” said Kovaleski. “We have never really had the ability to design devices around a radioisotope with an on-off switch. The potential for innovation is very exciting.”

The device uses a crystal to produce more than 100,000 volts of electricity from only 10 volts of electrical input with low power consumption. Having such a low need for power could allow the crystal to be fueled by batteries. The crystal, made from a material called lithium niobate, uses the piezoelectric effect to amplify the input voltage. Piezoelectricity is the phenomenon whereby certain materials produce an electric charge when the material is under stress.

Kovaleski’s team published “Investigation of the Piezoelectric Effect as a Means to Generate X-Rays” in the journal IEEE Transaction on Plasma Science. Kovaleski is interim department chair of the Electrical & Computer Engineering in MU’s Department of Engineering.

Via: "University Of Missouri"

Google Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus.

Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts. “If you write a blog post, you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating some meaningful sentences.” For now, search engines have brute-force algorithms that pick out key words in popular pages and hope that the results, on average, will yield the best information.

So-called “semantic” search parses the meaning and intentions behind words. Semantic search aims to solve the ‘hotdog’ problem, as explained by Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt,

“Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.”

Eventually Google will understand why users are searching for information and provide them with answers they didn’t even know they needed. The education of such an omnipotent new mind will take the vast stores of Google’s database. Perhaps more than any other company, explains Kurzweil, Google has access to the “things you read, what you write, in your emails or blog posts, and so on, even your conversations, what you hear, what you say.”

Google can combine the personalized recommendations of a friend (who often know us better than we know ourselves) with the sum of all human knowledge, creating a sort of super best friend.

This friend of yours, this cybernetic friend, that knows that you that have certain questions about certain health issues or business strategies. And, It can then be canvassing all the new information that comes out in the world every minute and then bring things to your attention without you asking about them

Kurzweil was quick to dispel the myth he was given “unlimited” funds, but humbly suggests that Google is giving him “sufficient resources for a very important project.”

Via: "Tech Crunch"