Verge Detours – The Verge

A Danish company is building a $335 million seawall around New York

2014-10-01T09:30:02-04:00

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We've traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America's problems in new and unconventional ways.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy destroyed homes, wasted businesses, flooded tunnels, and submerged subways. The storm brought tens of thousands of lives to a halt, and revealed New York City's vulnerabilities to severe climate conditions and rising waters.

"I saw the devastation," says Henk Ovink. "But, I also saw the opportunity Sandy brought."

Ovink is the former director general of water planning in the Netherlands, a country that's been de …

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Finally, a fire hydrant for the 21st century

2014-09-24T11:26:02-04:00

New York City, with its dense population and endless skyscrapers, is notoriously difficult to fight fires in. Firefighters depend on nearly 100,000 hydrants to do their work, but many of these hydrants are in disrepair. Vulnerable to misuse and exposed to extreme weather, the city's hydrants are decayed, leaking, and corroding.

"There are so many defected hydrants," says Vincent Dunn, a retired Deputy Chief of New York City Fire Depart …

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Can crowdfunding help San Francisco’s homeless?

2014-09-17T10:45:01-04:00

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We've traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America's problems in new and unconventional ways. Check in for new dispatches every Wednesday.

San Francisco is home to one of the densest concentrations of startup tycoons in the country. But not everyone here enjoys the fruits of the tech revolution - the city also hosts 7,350 people living in the street or in shelters, and thousands more in deep poverty. In neighborhoods like the Mission District and the Tenderloin, multimillion-dollar condos stand in jarring contrast to a sizeable popu …

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Put a wing on it: how one company’s smart wing could change San Francisco’s ferries

2014-09-10T10:15:02-04:00

Ferries play a critical role in the San Francisco Bay Area: they serve 7 million commuters annually, and provide the region with a service plan in case of emergency.

But in a part of the country that champions environmentally-friendly advances, ferries are a throwback to earlier, dirtier times. "They're horrendously inefficient in terms of energy use," says Jay Gardner, co-founder of Wind+Wing Technologies. "It's not something operators wa …

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Doctor turns to 3D printers in a race to save a toddler’s mind

2014-09-03T11:41:15-04:00

On a Tuesday last summer, Erin Mandeville was at a CVS buying medicine for her five-month-old baby, Gabriel. Close to 4PM, she noticed her infant's eyes roll back in quick succession. It was the first of Gabriel's many episodes of infantile spasms that would follow.

Spasms or epileptic seizures can be catastrophic for young children. Doctors at Boston Children's Hospital tried every route and medicine to help Gabriel as his seizures progre …

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How to feed the cities of the future

2014-08-27T13:51:45-04:00

At MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Caleb Harper's CityFARM demonstrates the future of food production. He grows plants through aeroponics, a system that produces plants without soil. Plants are hooked up to servers and misting mechanisms. LEDs fill in for the sun and ladybugs (purchased on Amazon) occasionally make an appearance. Plants are periodically sprayed with a nutrient-rich mist that provides optimal pH balance. Light and …

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The Verge Detours season 2 returns August 27th

2014-08-15T11:00:02-04:00

Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We've traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America's problems in new and unconventional ways.

We've looked far and wide, in Portland, New York, Boston, and San Francisco to find who is driving the next generation of innovation. These are the best and brightest going beyond just apps and gadgets, and they're using science, technology, and design to attack all sorts of big problems and tough issues. We examine how groups are rethinking New York City's approach to fighting flooding in New York City in a post-Sandy world, a new "wind wi …

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The camera next door: how neighbors watch neighbors in New Orleans

2013-11-13T11:59:02-05:00

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About three years ago, there was an armed robbery in Tom Vogel's driveway. Three women were walking down one of the quaint, narrow streets in New Orleans' Lower French Quarter around 1AM when a car crept up and a man jumped out with a gun. The robber grabbed one of the women, ripped off her purse, slipped back into the car, and sped away. Vogel, his wife, and their two dogs noticed nothing. It was the perfect crime.

Except the whole thing was caught on camera.

Soon after the mugging, a detective was in the Vogels' living room, watching the footage from the Vogels' four security cameras. The cop recognized the thief's car and arrested peopl …

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Where cats glow green: weird feline science in New Orleans

2013-11-06T11:15:01-05:00

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On a Wednesday morning in September, two doctors, a veterinarian, and a gaggle of externs gathered in an operating room in a science lab deep in the dark, green woods on the west bank of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana.

On the table lay Junebug, an ordinary brown-and-black house cat under anaesthesia. Her eggs were about to be harvested in order to be combined with cells from a rusty-spotted cat, the smallest member of the feline family and one of the rarest cat species in the world.

"Puncture!" Dr. Earle Pope, one of the center's three senior scientists, announced each time his needle penetrated the cat's ovarian follicle …

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The sinkhole that swallowed a swamp

2013-10-30T14:00:05-04:00

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Everyone in the state of Louisiana knows about the Bayou Corne sinkhole. It even shows up on Google Maps. But it still took a year for the crisis to get national attention, by which time the pit of brackish water was 24 acres across. And when the nation finally turned its eye on Bayou Corne, it wasn't because of the Mother Jones expose. It was because of a YouTube video.

The video, "8/21/13 Slough in," opens on a copse of hulking cedars at the edge of what appears to be a calm lake. Suddenly, voices in the background shout, "They're moving!" as a dozen trees glide downward in unison, their tops shaking and quivering as they're sucked beneat …

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