Headline News

...The two categories that have shown the biggest year-over-year increases in total compensation are (1) occupations in transportation and material moving and (2) employees at junior colleges, colleges, universities and professional schools. So what do truckers and professors have in common? Ms. Swonk observes that their jobs are both hard to either outsource or automate, unlike a lot of other occupations.

How California handles the catastrophic failure of giant steel rods on the nearly finished Bay Bridge will help other states and countries avoid a similar and possibly fatal mistake, say international engineering association leaders. "Engineers working in this area from throughout the world are waiting with bated breath to hear the outcome of the forensic and failure analysis," said Kevin Garrity, engineer and the immediate past president of NACE International, the Corrosion Society.

Researchers at IBM, using movement data collected from millions of cell-phone users in Ivory Coast in West Africa, have developed a new model for optimizing an urban transportation system. The IBM model prescribed changes in bus routes around the around Abidjan, the nation’s largest city. These changes—based on people’s movements as discerned from cell-phone records—could, in theory, slash travel times 10 percent.

For the first time in human history, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are expected to pass 400 parts per million across much of the Northern Hemisphere in May, according to scientists who study data from the Mauna Loa Observatory, the world's longest-running CO2 monitoring station...."This is another global emissions target that we've blown past without doing anything," said Jim Butler, director of global monitoring at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory. "Stronger storms, droughts, rising seas. We are already seeing the impacts of increased CO2 in the atmosphere... How much further can we really go?"