Aral Sea Restoration

But Kazakhstan’s North Aral Sea has seen a happier outcome, thanks to a nearly $86m project financed in large part by the World Bank. Along with repairs to existing dikes around the basin to prevent spillage, an 13km dam was constructed just south of the Syr Darya River. Completed in the summer of 2005, this dam, named Kokaral, surpassed all expectations. It led to an 3m increase in water levels after just 7 months—a goal that scientists initially expected would take 3 years.

Retiring in Prison

Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft? Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that’s changing. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than 6x, to almost 6M. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo’s government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40% either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. They have no one to turn to when they need help.

Artificial Rain

China is planning the implementation of a large-scale weather changing project to ensure a consistent rain supply. The system is created from a network of solid fuel burning chambers that produce silver iodide, a compound with a structure much like ice that can be used in cloud seeding. Once in place, the system has the potential to increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic meters a year. 10000s of the small burning chambers will be installed across the Tibetan Plateau in an attempt to increase rainfall in an area 3x as big as Spain

Steps to self-driving

This is why so much work is going into how the vehicle might communicate with the user – ‘this is an L5 journey and you can sleep’, or ‘I’ll drive myself for the next hour, and alert you 5 minutes before it’s time for you to take over’? Does that autonomous golf cart just refuse to cross an invisible line into a neighborhood where it’s not certified for autonomy? And can you push the Johnnycab driver out of the way?

Outstanding Tacos

Tacos have nearly taken over from slices of pizza as the culinary backbone of New York City. Over the last 30 years we’ve learned to love the southern Mexican style of 2 corn tortillas flopped over a meaty filling, sprinkled with onions and cilantro. But other types of tacos have flown in the window, too, reminding us of the days when all we had were hardshells. Like your tacos rolled? Or tiny? Or with a flour tortilla? Or with a dab of guac? Freighted with organs? Or “Arabe? style — wrapped in a flour tortilla like shawarma? We’ve got ’em all, and more. Here are our favorite taquerias, curated by Eater critic Robert Sietsema. And it’s not that we don’t love chef-driven tacos, fusion tacos, or tacos produced by chains: We do! But this collection is reserved for humbler classic specimens.

Imaginary cities

A Japanese graphic designer has made it his life’s work to design an improbably realistic and detailed map of a city that doesn’t exist.

Nagomuru City, located in a country called Naira that very closely resembles Japan but isn’t quite the same place, has everything you could want from the city you live in, from house numbers to subways to convenience stores to art colleges to 1970s housing complexes to ancient temples, except the possibly desirable quality of actually existing in 3 dimensions.

Mikkeller NYC

Beloved brewery Mikkeller is finally tapping into the New York City market, adding a large brewery attached to Citi Field in Queens come Sunday, March 25. The 1000 m2 space at 126th Street and 37th Avenue functions as a brewery, bar, and restaurant, with 60 rotating taps and a menu that pulls together food from various chefs.

KCBC in the news

it’s great that my brewery is the best in nyc even though the article starts kind of shit. nonsense like “no one has heard of it”, “fledgling” etc is perhaps this writers idea of “edgy”, but it’s also very inaccurate. it gets better after that.