What Do You Build in a City That Has Everything? Why a Soccer Stadium.

$700M proposal calls for NYC's first soccer stadium and 550 affordable apartments in the South Bronx | 6sqft

Rendering via Rafael Viñoly Architects New York City could be getting its first soccer stadium if a proposal for the project led by Related Companies gets chosen by officials.

From article, (New York City could be getting its first soccer stadium if a proposal for the project led by Related Companies gets chosen by officials. A partnership made up of developers Related and Somerset Partners, along with the Major League Soccer team, New York City Football Club, has submitted a plan to bring a 26,000-seat soccer stadium designed by Rafael Viñoly, over 550 units of affordable housing and a waterfront park to the South Bronx. According to YIMBY, the project, estimated to cost $700 million, would rise on the site of the Harlem River Yards, a 13-acre parcel in Mott Haven operated by the Empire State Development Corporation.

The stadium would be located next to the site that is already undergoing development by Somerset and Chetrit Group; they recently sold the five-acre parcel to Brookfield Properties for $165 million. The original project includes building six structures of housing, containing more than 1,200 units.

Sources tell YIMBY that the stadium would sit above existing rail yards, adding $75 million to the price tag. The proposal says the partnership would pay $500,000 annually for a 99-year ground lease. The group would also invest $25 million into the new waterfront park and an additional $100 million into making the site buildable.

 If chosen by the Empire State Development Corporation for their RFP, the partnership expects a completion date of 2022.)

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China is Pushing Down the Cost of Electric Battery Buses, Just Like it Did for Solar Panels.

China made solar panels cheap. Now it's doing the same for electric buses.

It is now more or less taken for granted that solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper. But that didn't just happen - solar PV did not jump onto that trajectory on its own. After all, solar panels have been around for decades, but they didn't really start plunging down the cost curve until the mid- to late-2000s.

From article, (It is now more or less taken for granted that solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper. But that didn’t just happen — solar PV did not jump onto that trajectory on its own. After all, solar panels have been around for decades, but they didn’t really start plunging down the cost curve until the mid- to late-2000s.

Germany deserves some credit for creating demand with its aggressive feed-in tariffs. President Barack Obama and the Democrats deserve some credit for creating demand with the 2009 stimulus bill. But the lion’s share of credit goes to China, which, rather than fiddling with tax breaks and credits and “market mechanisms,” invested a boatload of money into production subsidies, scaling the industry up by brute force.

China’s wild binge of solar manufacturing drove down the costs of panels, both by oversupplying the market and by hastening economies of scale. In effect, the country voluntarily took on the costs of pushing solar panels onto the “S-curve” of rapid growth, a strategy that will greatly benefit the Chinese — and the rest of humanity.

Now there’s evidence that China is in the midst of doing the same thing for another key clean-energy product: electric buses.

The rapidly growing megacity of Shenzhen, China, was choked with diesel pollution in the early 2010s. Though buses were just 0.5 percent of the city’s vehicles, they were responsible for 20 percent of the air pollution.

So, as the World Resources Institute recounts, Shenzhen electrified them. All 16,359 of them. It took only a few short years:

Shenzhen now has the worlds largest fleet of BEBs.

It got there through some cleverness — they planned out charging infrastructure and pushed manufacturers to offer lifetime warranties on batteries — but mainly through government subsidies, which covered up to half the upfront cost of the vehicles.

A similar story played out nationally over the same time frame.

In 2013, China was bopping along with 1,700 BEBs. Around then, it realized that its rapidly expanding urbanization could not continue to rely on diesel buses, lest it make an already crippling air-pollution problem even worse.

So it decided to make electric buses a thing. How? By dumping a giant pile of money on the problem, subsidizing the purchase of more than 350,000 BEBs in the following four years. Battery and hybrid electric buses went from 0.6 percent of annual bus sales in the country to 22 percent in 2017. They now constitute 17 percent of the nation’s total bus fleet.

Today, of the roughly 385,000 BEBs that BNEF estimates are operating in the world’s cities (13 percent of the global bus fleet), 99 percent — virtually all — are in China. The country has, in a few years, taken electric buses from a niche product to a decent-sized chunk of the global market. Costs are already falling.

BNEF runs the numbers — not only on upfront costs but on total cost of ownership (TCO), including operating and maintenance costs — on a range of buses with different sized batteries in different cities with different costs of diesel and electricity. I won’t go through all the details. Suffice it to say, in many cities, lifetime costs are already lower for BEBs than for diesel buses.

Basically, costs will decline, and upfront cost parity will get closer, the faster BEB demand rises. It seems to me that the shocking explosion of demand in China is good reason to believe that even BNEF’s optimistic demand forecasts are conservative — but we shall see.

Every forward-looking city that adds to BEB demand in the short-term, slipstreaming behind China’s lead, pushes demand up faster and thereby pushes costs down faster. And if early experiments prove a success, the hundreds of other growing cities in the world suffering from diesel pollution could follow suit, ahead of schedule. (India, a huge potential market for BEBs, is choking on diesel as we speak.)

I would not be at all surprised if we look back in 10 years and see clearly that China, almost single-handedly, forced BEBs onto the S-curve of accelerated development. Thanks, China!)

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Discovering Mountains on an Exoplanet Would be Another Key to Figuring Out if it Has Life.

Exoplanet Everests May Be Detectable When Giant Telescopes Come Online

The Himalayas distort Earth's contour only about as much as a human hair would that of a billiard ball. Discerning such a minuscule bump on a planet orbiting a distant star might seem laughably impossible, but two astronomers have proposed a way to detect mountains and other surface features on exoplanets.

From article, (The Himalayas distort Earth's contour only about as much as a human hair would that of a billiard ball. Discerning such a minuscule bump on a planet orbiting a distant star might seem laughably impossible, but two astronomers have proposed a way to detect mountains and other surface features on exoplanets.

Finding mountains could help address another key question: Can these planets hold life?

Life on Earth is apparently dependent on the inner life of the planet itself. Plate tectonics recycles carbon and regulates temperatures, and Earth's magnetic field provides a shield from dangerous solar winds. Mountains and volcanoes are signs that a planet has, or at least at one point had, such an inner life.

Astronomers have now identified some 3,700 planets, but little is known about most of them besides their size and mass. Most were detected by the so-called transit method, in which astronomers measure a slight dimming of the light from a distant star when a planet orbits in front of it. The strategy proposed by McTier and her Columbia colleague David Kipping builds on that method but will likely require huge telescopes that may not be completed for decades.

The astronomers' insight is that a rotating, mountainous planet presents a changing silhouette during transit, causing measurements of the dip in light to fluctuate. Based on conservative estimates, the scientists believe the “bumpiness” of planets as mountainous as Mars could be measured accurately by a 74-meter telescope observing transits for about 20 hours, spread out over roughly six months. That is still a tall order for today's telescopes, but larger ones are on the horizon.

Even if astronomers manage to confirm a planet's bumpiness, they will need additional information—such as the presence of liquid water, tolerable temperatures and an atmosphere—to interpret the implications for habitability. “No single piece of information is going to solve it,” Kipping notes.)

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Elon Musk Gets Serious About Digging Tunnels for Transportation.

Boring Co. Raises $112.5 Million To Make Musk's High-Speed Tunnel Vision A Thing

Share to email Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Share to google The Boring Co., Elon Musk's industrial experiment to build high-speed underground transportation systems in dense urban regions, has apparently raised nearly $113 million to get operations under way.

 From article, (The Boring Co., Elon Musk’s industrial experiment to create high-speed underground transportation systems in dense urban regions, has apparently raised nearly $113 million to get operations under way.

“Over 90% of this funding round came from Elon, with the rest from early employees,” the Boring Company said in a statement, adding that no outside investors were involved. The fundraising news was reported earlier by Axios.com.

Musk has promoted his new operation for the past year, and it’s aggressively pursuing projects in Los Angeles, Chicago and between New York and Washington. An initial tunnel in Hawthorne, the Los Angeles suburb where both it and SpaceX are headquartered, is already being built and permits are being sought to expand that project.

The company’s intention is to build tunnels with custom-designed excavation machines for Hyperloops, Musk’s long-envisioned vacuum tube train idea to ferry passengers between cities at speeds in excess of 600 miles an hour. The tunnels could also be designed for smaller “Loops,” high-speed transportation pods on autonomous “electric skates” traveling at up to 150 miles an hour, according to Boring Co.’s website. The pods could hold up to 16 passengers as a type of mass-transit system or transport individual vehicles beneath city streets.)

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A Bacteria Has Been Discovered that Eats Plastic. An Enzyme it Produces Actually is What Breaks Down the Plastic. We Could Spray it on Ocean Plastic Waste and Get Rid of This Waste Once and For All.

Recycling hope for plastic-hungry enzyme

Scientists have improved a naturally occurring enzyme which can digest some of our most commonly polluting plastics. PET, the strong plastic commonly used in bottles, takes hundreds of years to break down in the environment. The modified enzyme, known as PETase, can start breaking down the same material in just a few days.

 From article, (Polyesters, industrially produced from petroleum, are widely used in plastic bottles and clothing.

Current recycling processes mean that polyester materials follow a downward quality spiral, losing some of their properties each time they go through the cycle. Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill.

PET, the strong plastic commonly used in bottles, takes hundreds of years to break down in the environment.

Researchers reported in 2016 that they had found [a bacterial] strain living in sediments at a bottle recycling site in the port city of Sakai.

[The bacteria] Ideonella sakaiensis uses the plastic as its major energy source.

discovered in Japan, the enzyme produced by [the] bacterium "eats" PET.

"[PET] has only been around in vast quantities over the last 50 years, so it's actually not a very long timescale for a bacteria to have evolved to eat something so man-made," commented Prof John McGeehan, who was involved in the current study.

Polyesters, the group of plastics that PET (also called polyethylene terephthalate) belongs to, do occur in nature.

"They protect plant leaves," explained the University of Portsmouth researcher. "Bacteria have been evolving for millions of years to eat that."

The switch to PET was nevertheless "quite unexpected" and an international team of scientists set out to determine how the PETase enzyme had evolved.

The modified enzyme, known as PETase, can start breaking down [plastic] material in just a few days.

This could revolutionise the recycling process, allowing plastics to be re-used more effectively.

PETase was also tested on PEF plastic, a proposed plant-based alternative to PET that is similarly slow to degrade in nature.

"We were absolutely stunned when we did that experiment because it actually works better on PEF than PET," Prof McGeehan told BBC News.

PETase reverses the manufacturing process, reducing polyesters to their building blocks, ready to be used again.

The enzyme is a number of years away from being deployed on a widespread scale. It will need to degrade PET faster than its current time of a few days before becoming economically viable as part of the recycling landscape.

Prof McGeehan is hopeful that this marks the beginning of a shift in the management of plastics.

"There is an urgent need to reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in landfill and the environment, and I think if we can adopt these technologies we actually have a potential solution in the future to doing that" he added.)

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