Train View Hudson Tunnel Credit: Mike Rosenthal/New Jersey Transit

Building Big Under New York

The Hudson River tunnels connecting New Jersey and Manhattan are a century old this week, and have stood the test of time. Now, using new technology and some age-old construction principles, engineers and politicians are planning to build more:

New Jersey Transit and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are planning to spend $7.6 billion to build a second set that will more than double, to 48 an hour, the number of trains that can traverse the Hudson.

Ken Belson takes a look at the work required to expand the connection between New Jersey and New York, and the issues involved – engineering, political, and financial – when thinking big:

The ARC tunnels are part of a larger tableau of civil projects that include the construction of the Second Avenue subway and the East Side Access project that will bring L.I.R.R. trains to a station adjacent to Grand Central Terminal. Some pundits have compared these days of large-scale projects to when master builders like Robert Moses reshaped New York’s landscape with aplomb.

The Font of Obama’s Message

Steven Heller of the New York Times Campaign Stops blog asks branding expert Brian Collins about Barack Obama’s use of the Gotham font to communicate his message:

Barack Obama is running the first real transmedia campaign of the 21st century. His people not only understand how media has splintered, but how audiences have splintered, too.

Cell phones, mobile devices, Web sites, e-mail, social networks, iPods, laptops, billboards, print ads and campaign events are now just as important as television. The senator’s design strategy has given these diverse platforms (and their different audiences) a coherence that makes them all work together.

Coprolites: Nature Calls, and Gives New Clues to Early Human Presence

Scientists have found the first DNA-based evidence of Human presence in North America in Oregon, indicating they were here 1,000 years earlier than previously thought. So where did the DNA come from?

Coprolites, or fossilized feces:

The samples were discovered near a crude dart or spear tip chiseled from obsidian, as well as bones of horses and camels that were then common in the region. The researchers described their finding as a “smoking gun” in the long-running debate over when and where humans first inhabited the New World.

Dennis Jenkins [of the University of Oregon] said the feces were easy to identify. In the thin, fine dirt, he said, the fossilized coprolites were unmistakable. “Basically, it looks like what it is: poop,” he said. “Dried up like that, it maintains its shape and is very different from the surrounding soil.”

Jokes aside, if this discovery is confirmed and widely accepted by researchers, it changes the current theory that suggests humans migrated southward over the high plains of what is now the US:

But if very early humans lived in Oregon, that suggests they either came directly from Asia by boat or traveled down the Pacific coastline after crossing the land bridge….According to DNA specialist Eske Willerslev, an author of the paper, the newfound DNA was of a distinct Native American grouping — similar to some early people from Central Asia, but different in some important ways.

Map Credit: By Mary Kate Cannistra – The Washington Post