A Floating Pontoon Highway, for NYC's displaced L riders, with a Draw Bridge for ship traffic, could be set up in 6-8 months to transport Bus Traffic between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Could an East River Pontoon Bridge Save Us From the L-pocalypse?

Earlier this week, the MTA and DOT revealed their plans for ferry service during the L-train shutdown, with proposed routes connecting North Williamsburg to Stuyvesant Cove. However, a recently launched project is floating another unusual solution to the impending L-pocalypse: a pontoon bridge.

From article, (Earlier this week, the MTA and DOT revealed their plans for ferry serviceduring the L-train shutdown, with proposed routes connecting North Williamsburg to Stuyvesant Cove. However, a recently launched project is floating another unusual solution to the impending L-pocalypse: a pontoon bridge. L-ternative Bridge, created by New Yorker Parker Shinn, touts the pontoon bridge as a cheap, quick-to-assemble option that would alleviate some of the difficulties posed by the shutdown of the Canarsie Tube.

Shinn hopes that his design, created with the help of a naval architect and a civil engineer, will garner enough public support to attract the attention and backing of the MTA and other city officials, according to a release.

The project’s website states that the East River pontoon bridge “would be capable of supporting two lanes for bus traffic and two walking/bike paths.” In addition, they claim that construction would only take 6-8 months and could be “completely covered” by a toll of $1. The bridge would be made up of 37 deck barges, each 90 feet in length and held in place with 3,500 pound anchors to prevent the bridge from being swept away.

Pontoon bridges have been used for over a thousand years, and are still commonly used by militaries to cross large bodies of water quickly and efficiently, says the website.

 L-ternative’s plan also includes an overpass to be built over FDR Drive that would allow buses and pedestrians to pass underneath to avoid traffic jams, and even includes a 240-foot drawbridge, which would allow ship traffic to pass through at scheduled intervals– just hopefully not during peak hours.)

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Coming to your front door. A Waymo Taxi Car completely driverless.

You can now hail a ride in a fully autonomous vehicle, courtesy of Waymo

Google's autonomous driving company Waymo will soon make its official debut as a full-scale service on public streets. Arizona gave Waymo transportation network company (TNC) status on January 24, following the company's application on January 12, Quartz reported. The application contained photos of the self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans Waymo will be operating in five states.

 From article, (Google’s autonomous driving company Waymo will soon make its official debut as a full-scale service on public streets. Arizona gave Waymo transportation network company (TNC) status on January 24, following the company’s application on January 12, Quartz reported. The application contained photos of the self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans Waymo will be operating in five states. The company is assembling a fleet consisting of thousands of these vehicles.

Waymo has been testing in Arizona since April, where select Phoenix residents were given 24/7 access to the taxi service for free. The fleet is composed of Pacifica Hybrid models, which are actually plug-in hybrids that have an all-electric range of 33 miles. At first there were engineers in the driver’s seats, but starting in November the hailed vehicles were driverless.

With its new TNC status, Waymo can start charging riders for its service, which can be accessed from a computer or an app. This could spell trouble for Uber, which has serious self-driving aspirations of its own. This came prominently to light when Waymo filed a massive lawsuit against its rival, which alleged that Uber rival stole intellectual property relating to self-driving technology.

The conflict lasted over a year, and ended with the order for Uber to give Waymo a 0.34-percent equity stake in the company. At an estimated $72 billion value, Waymo’s settlement is worth close to a quarter of a billion dollars.

Waymo plans to extend its service to other cities, and its TNC permit goes a long way towards this endeavor.)

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New Form of Light leads to a slowing down of light's speed by 100,000 times. Which begs the question: Since we now know we can slow down the speed of light, could there be a way to speed it up? Or gently push a space probe or craft to light speeds?

Scientists Create a New Form of Light by Linking Photons

smithsonian.com It's a glimpse of science fiction made fact: S cientists have created a new form of light that could someday be used to build light crystals. But before would-be Jedis start demanding their sabers, the advance is far more likely to lead to intriguing new ways of communicating and computing, researchers report this week in Science .

 From article, (Light is made up of photons—speedy, tiny packets of energy. Typically, photons do not interact with each other at all, which is why when using flashlights “you don’t see the light beams bounce off each other, you see them go through each other,” explains Sergio Cantu, a Ph.D. candidate in atomic physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In new experiments, however, the physicists coaxed individual photons to cozy up to each other and link, similar to the way individual atoms stick together in molecules.

The photon dance happens in a lab at MIT where the physicists run table-top experiments with lasers. Cantu, his colleague Aditya Venkatramani, a Ph.D. candidate in atomic physics at Harvard University, and their collaborators start by creating a cloud of chilled rubidium atoms. Rubidium is an alkali metal so it typically looks like a silver-white solid. But vaporizing rubidium with a laser and keeping it ultracold creates a cloud the researchers contain in a small tube and magnetize. This keeps the rubidium atoms diffuse, slow moving and in a highly excited state.

Then the team fires a weak laser at the cloud. The laser is so weak that just a handful of photons enter the cloud, a press release from MIT explains. The physicists measure the photons when they exit the other side of the cloud and that is when things get weird.

Normally the photons would be traveling at the speed of light—or almost 300,000 kilometers per second. But after passing through the cloud, the photons creep along 100,000 times slower than normal. Also, instead of exiting the cloud randomly, the photons come through in pairs or triplets. These pairs and triplets also give off a different energy signature, a phase shift, that tells the researchers the photons are interacting.

“Initially, it was unclear,” says Venkatramani. The team had seen two photons interact before, but they didn’t know if triplets were possible. After all, he explains, a hydrogen molecule is a stable arrangement of two hydrogen atoms but three hydrogen atoms can’t remain together for longer than a millionth of a second. “We were not sure three photons would be a stable molecule or something we could even see,” he says.​

Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that the three-photon grouping is even more stable than two. “The more you add, the more strongly they are bound,” says Venkatramani.

But how do the photons get together? The physicists’ theoretical model suggests that as a single photon moves through the cloud of rubidium, it hops from one atom to another, “like a bee flitting between flowers,” the press release explains. One photon can briefly bind to an atom, forming a hybrid photon-atom or polariton. If two of these polaritons meet in the cloud, they interact. When they reach the edge of the cloud, the atoms stay behind and the photons sail forward, still bound together. Add more photons and same phenomenon gives rise to triplets.

“Now that we understand what leads to interactions being attractive, you can ask: Can you make them repel each other instead?” says Cantu. Fundamentally, playing with the interaction could reveal new insights into how energy works or where it comes from, he says.)

 

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Add another slogan for SpaceX: "Soon to be Satellite Internet Provider."

SpaceX 's next salvo in the space wars: Launching test satellites to bring the Web to billions

SpaceX is on a collision course with the world's biggest telecom and satellite manufacturing companies, as it steps up development of its "Starlink" network of satellites. The company will soon test its first satellites, Microsat 2a and 2b, which are headed for orbit aboard SpaceX's planned Sunday launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, according to documents filed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

 From article, (SpaceX is on a collision course with the world's biggest telecom and satellite manufacturing companies, as it steps up development of its "Starlink" network of satellites.

The company will soon test its first satellites, Microsat 2a and 2b, which are headed for orbit aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, according to documents filed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These satellites will take the next step into space, which is critical for the network's progress.

the cost structure of the business is so much better than when Bill Gates tried it," Paul Gallant, analyst at Guggenheim Partners, told The Washington Post. "I think Musk's track record of disruptive innovation would make this a really attractive business for the ... FCC to support."

SpaceX has heavily decreased the cost of access to space with its Falcon lines of rockets, with launch prices in the tens of millions – compared to the hundreds of millions or billions offered by competitors. With the satellite-internet business Musk may well have found a staple business for SpaceX, one which could make his dreams of colonizing Mars closer to reality.

Current broadband satellites, such as those from DirecTV and Dish Network, offer latency speeds around 600 milliseconds at best – many times slower than the 25 to 30 millisecond speeds SpaceX is expected to offer, according to FCC documents.

SpaceX will begin launching an initial constellation of 4,425 Ka/Ku band [a term that indicates range on the electromagnetic spectrum] low Earth orbit satellites in 2019, with the system becoming operational once at least 800 satellites are deployed, the FCC documents show. The two test satellites will orbit about 700 miles above the Earth, in the same range as the eventual constellation.

Starlink will offer broadband speeds comparable to fiber optic networks, according to FCC documents, by essentially creating a blanket connection across the electromagnetic spectrum. The satellites would offer new direct to consumer wireless connections, rather the present system's redistribution of signals.

Competitor OneWeb, backed by Japan's SoftBank, has raised over $1 billion to build a constellation of 720 Ku band satellites, also aiming to deploy in 2019 and at an altitude of about 750 miles in low Earth orbit. OneWeb's request was approved by the FCC last year.

Telesat, another satellite operator with FCC, is working to build a constellation of 120 Ka band satellites by 2021. Telesat's constellation is primarily targeted for use by U.S. military, but it did launch a satellite in January to test broadband services.

SpaceX is also planning an additional constellation of 7,518 V band satellites, situated in a "very low" Earth orbit at just over 200 miles. The V band spectrum has yet to be used heavily by commercial services but several companies are looking to expand high-speed direct-to-consumer services using the system.

SpaceX is valued around $21.5 billion and has received at least $1 billion in investment from Google-parent Alphabet, as well as Fidelity. The company says it has over 100 missions on its upcoming launch manifest that are worth more than $12 billion in contracts.)

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