natural disasters
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See The Glass Half Full In This Underwater Mirror
Joe Doucet’s circular mirror isn’t waterlogged for nothing. He designed it as a reminder of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in lower Manhattan (where his studio is) and the rest of the east coast.
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Flood-Powered Gate Automatically Raises As The Waters Rise
Deploying the improved infrastructure that will hopefully help prevent future tsunamis from devastating Japan is an expensive endeavour. So researchers are developing new and cheaper ways to protect the country, like this innovative floodgate that deploys automatically when waters come rushing in — no power or human operators required.
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The California-Made Earthquake Alarm That Works But California Won’t Build
For all of the devastation caused by the 2011 earthquake/tsunami in Japan, the former, a 9.0 magnitude beast called “Tohoku,” could have claimed far more lives. The reason it didn’t? Since 2007, Japan has had an early warning system — conceived 10 years ago at Caltech — which California still hasn’t managed to set up.…
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Watch This Anti-Earthquake Table Shrug Off A Violent Simulated Tremor
It’s all but impossible to stop an entire building from shaking along with an earthquake, but that doesn’t mean you can’t protect what’s inside. Japan’s THK designs and builds these ‘seismic isolation tables’ which are able to counteract the violent movements of an earthquake on a smaller scale.