How does a city obtain water, gas, and electricity? Where do these services come from? How are they transported? The answer is infrastructure, or the inner, and sometimes invisible, workings of the city. Roads, railroads, bridges, telephone wires, and power lines are visible elements of the infrastructure; sewers, plumbing pipes, wires, tunnels, cables, and sometimes rails are usually buried underground or hidden behind walls. Engineering the City tells the fascinating story of in...

Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis don't happen every day, so how can budding scientists study how they work? Through experiments, models, and demonstrations. This in-depth resource will teach readers how to build a seismograph to record a simulated earthquake, compare pressure waves and shear waves—the two types of ground shocks—using a Slinky, and replicate a tsunami's destructive effect on a "coastline" built in a bathtub. Authors Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori even discuss issues o...

In a retirement home on the fringe of Miami after decades of rising seas, the remaining residents struggle with the prospect of being relocated asa hurricane approaches. The story follows an environmental scientist, an engineer, a former ballerina and her husband/manager, a couple obsessedby a comparison to the holocaust, a widow warning about the end of times, the owner of the home distraught by the consequences of his inescapableloss, and the nurse who looks to a ...

Understand what's behind floods, fires, droughts, heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, and moreFor years, the world has been inundated with natural disasters. We are hit with a constant barrage of traumatic headlines. The body count climbs. Temperature extremes are broken on all continents. Entire towns disappear to devastating floods. Towns, cities, countries burn from extreme heat and drought. Hurricanes and tornadoes rip across the country causing untol...

A gifted architect, Philip Corta, has the opportunity of a lifetime-the design of the Eden Center, a major office/residential complex on New York's West Side. The project endures many setbacks brought on by an arrogant developer, corruption in City Hall, sabotage and murder by organized criminals, and recurring uncertainties about financing. Nevertheless, construction proceeds more or less on schedule until . . . .