Technology & Society
How connectivity, automation, and everyday technology are reshaping cities, work, and daily life.
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A New Flash Flood Warning System Is Coming to Every NWS Office This Fall
What happens when the flood warning comes after the water is already in your living room? A new satellite-powered system aims to close that gap nationwide.
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California’s New AskCA Assistant Cuts Through Government Red Tape
Picture a family in Los Angeles County a week after a wildfire, phone in hand, trying to figure out which of a dozen state agencies handles disaster housing help. California built its new AskCA AI assistant to cut through exactly that tangle. Governor Gavin Newsom introduced the tool on September 9, and the state opened…
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New Mexico’s Public Wi-Fi Push Reaches 17 Counties
More than four million visits happen every year at New Mexico parks, plazas, and community centers that, until this month, offered no way to get online. New Mexico public Wi-Fi is about to close that gap. The state’s Office of Broadband Access and Expansion just awarded nearly $6 million to wire dozens of public spaces…
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Orlando Energy Savings Program Cuts Renters’ Power Bills
Low-income households in Orlando spend 130% more of their monthly income on power bills than the average American family. The city built the Orlando Energy Savings Program to close that gap, and a few months into the rollout, the early numbers already show it’s working. Orlando’s Office of Sustainability & Resilience runs the program, and…
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Twin Cities EV Spot Network Puts Car-Free Living Within Reach
Forty-four percent of the people renting an electric car by the hour in Minneapolis and St. Paul come from low-income households. Most don’t own a car of their own, and more than three-quarters say this service is the reason why. The program behind those numbers, the Twin Cities EV Spot Network, just picked up a…
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How AI Protects Jacksonville Homeowners From Investors
Investors bought roughly 8,000 homes in Jacksonville, Florida between 2018 and 2024, a 145% jump that handed outside companies more than one in five of the city’s single-family rental houses. Many of those homes belonged to families who never meant to sell. They just never got around to updating a deed after a parent or…
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NJ Transit’s Bus Tracking Upgrade Cuts the Guesswork for Riders
Picture a rider standing at a New Jersey bus stop, phone in hand, watching an app guess wildly at when the next bus might actually show up. That daily frustration is exactly what NJ Transit’s bus tracking upgrade is chipping away at. The agency has now outfitted more than 1,500 of its buses with upgraded…
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West Virginia’s Broadband Expansion Reaches 10 Rural Counties
Roughly 10,000 homes and small businesses scattered across ten West Virginia counties have been waiting years for something most Americans take for granted: internet fast enough to hold a video call without it freezing. That wait is ending. A new West Virginia broadband expansion, backed by $100 million in combined public and private funding, will…
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Rapid City’s New Streetlight Monitoring System Cuts Outage Wait Times
Drive down a side street in Rapid City after dark, and you might pass a streetlight that has been out for weeks. Nobody reported it, because nobody noticed, and the city’s public works department had no way to know either. That blind spot is about to close. The Rapid City City Council approved a plan…
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Kent County’s AI Recycling System Cuts Landfill Waste
Only one out of every four tons of recyclable material that Kent County, Michigan residents put out for pickup actually gets diverted from the trash pile. The rest, plastics, flattened boxes, all mixed in with regular household garbage, heads straight into the county’s aging waste-to-energy plant and burns alongside everything else. Kent County’s new AI…