If you’ve ever commuted through New York City during rush hour, you’ve probably experienced stress-inducing traffic, over-stuffed subway cars, or delays that don’t care if you’ve given yourself an extra half hour. In 1924 the New York metropolitan area’s population was already large enough to get the Transit Commission thinking of ways to accommodate future [...]

During the morning rush hour in New York City, tourists stand out as being the ones looking up. It’s possible that they see more clearly what most New Yorkers take for granted: water towers. Those archaic looking wooden structures that grace the rooftops of almost every New York City building play an integral, though often [...]

“Left or right?” he asked me as we watched the commuter train approach. A group of people nearby moved into position to line up with the door, all likely thinking the same thing: How do I get a seat? “Left,” I said. “These people are going to go right.” He looked at me for a [...]

Maker Faire invites young Makers to enter a world of innovation and imagination. If you can dream it, you can build it—particularly as experienced Makers are on-hand and willing to share what they know. How can we better encourage a broader participation in this science and technology showcase by underrepresented groups—beginning in the very neighborhood [...]

World Marker Faire 2011 was held at the New York Hall of Science in Corona, New York. This year the technology and DIY festival had a heavy leaning toward robots, like this shop bot: I met Microsoft’s EDDIE for the first time: The AiP Facebook page has an EDDIE album and some additional videos. The [...]

Ed Note: “On My Shelf” is my review series, covering notable books and events. For more notables, please see the reviews still housed at the old home of Anthropology in Practice. “New York is not composed of solid substances. It is a dynamic system of multi-layered flows of earth materials that travel through time and [...]

Ed Note: A version of this article appeared on Anthropology in Practice on Jan. 26th, 2010. How much do we really know about the food we eat? How do items like fruits and vegetables get to the supermarket? What goes into packaging and processing them so they’re safe to eat? Are local foods better? Street [...]

Jimmy Dugan firmly established that there’s no crying in baseball. But what about in public? In New York City, at some point or another you’re going to encounter a crying person—in fact, you could even be the crier. A few weeks ago, I boarded the subway for a short trip uptown. It was the middle [...]

On any given day, millions of conversations reverberate through New York City. Poke your head out a window overlooking a busy street and you will hear them: all those overlapping sentences, only half-intelligible, forming a dense acoustic mesh through which escapes an exclamation, a buoyant laugh, a child’s shrill cry now and then. Every spoken [...]

Yesterday New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed a $19.5 billion plan to protect his home town against future sea level rise and other effects of climate change such as heat waves. The big focus, however, is preventing death and damage from another Hurricane Sandy. The report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York,” prescribes 250 [...]

This summer, New York City will witness what might be called an airborne non-toxic event, to corrupt a term coined in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Over three days in July, the New York Police Department and scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., will release small amounts of a harmless, colorless gas [...]

The 2012 New York City Marathon may not be televised, but it is being organized on an unofficial basis by men and women who have banded together to run anyway. The official race was belatedly cancelled on Friday in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Teams from Canada, Germany, and Switzerland (identifiable because they carried their [...]

Evolutionary psychologists tell us it’s human nature to search for lessons from the skies. Here is what I think Hurricane Sandy is saying to the U.S.: If you don’t hang together, you will hang separately. I feel undeservedly lucky to be in a part of New York City that has power and water in Sandy’s [...]

GOWANUS, NEW YORK CITY–The winds continue to increase here, howling past windows and splattering the rain. Tiny beads of water almost feel like sand when you step outside thanks to the strong gusts. Such is Hurricane Sandy as it speeds into the New York metropolitan region and prepares to turn and slam in slow motion [...]

Condom use, earlier treatment and increased education have gone a long way to reducing HIV spread in the U.S. Nonetheless, some 4,000 inhabitants of New York City still became infected with HIV in 2009. Injection drug users make up a small portion of the new infections (just over 4 percent in NYC, and about 9 percent [...]

NEW YORK—For a spot news junkie, the sight of a podium-studded dais surrounded by people holding up recording devices is irresistible, especially on a hot summer day. So, I was delighted to happen this morning upon such a press conference on my way to the Scientific American office. The event was held to announce a [...]

This summer, New York City will receive a bike-share system much like those already in place in Paris, London, Washington, D.C., and dozens of other cities. Once the 10,000 blue CitiBikes are installed, a bike-share member will be able to check out a bicycle from one of 600 kiosks around the city (well, around the [...]

As Hurricane Irene trundles toward the densely populated cities of the U.S. Northeast, residents and officials in municipalities large and small have been preparing for a full-force tropical cyclone. “All implications point to this being a historic hurricane,” President Barak Obama said in a speech Friday morning. Some 50 million people along the eastern seaboard [...]

It’s not that the central and northern portions of the east coast of North America never see hurricanes. It’s just that we in the Northeast don’t see them that often. The last one was in 1999, and the last bad one was in 1938, a deadly one that caused damage  that can still be seen [...]

New York City is well on its way to meeting a citywide goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2017. This goal was adopted in 2007 as a part of PlaNYC 2030 to “build a greener, greater New York” and has catalyzed new parkland, housing improvement, and public transportation projects throughout the city. [...]

New York City has been called the birthplace of electricity itself. In 1882, Edison’s Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan became the country’s first central power plant, bringing 800 incandescent light bulbs to life.  Today, New York City draws its power from a mix of far-flung fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable (primarily hydroelectric) energy resources. [...]

Talk about eery timing. The current special issue of Scientific American is about cities, and as I type this, Hurricane Irene is making her way up the Atlantic seaboard and is expected to reach New York City by Sunday morning. I, like nearly everyone else, am refreshing news pages, blog posts, and scanning my Twitter [...]