Transportation

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of public health measures aimed at controlling the transmission of communicable diseases. Air travel can play a role in quickly spreading communicable diseases across the world and throughout communities. Given this potential, contact tracing for air passengers is an important measure for protecting public health. GAO was asked to examine CDC's process for collecting and managing air passengers' contact information to facilitate contact tracing. This report addresses: (1) the factors that affect CDC's ability to collect this information, (2) recent actions CDC has taken to improve the quality of the information it collects, and (3) how effectively it collects and manages this information. more »

"The goal was to offer women work that would be in line with a domestic role and 'not interfere with their primary maternal duties." Pullman centralized the laundry operations and built a new facility on Florence Boulevard (now 111th Street), where in 1892, more than 100 women washed “soiled bed linens, tablecloths and napkins.” In 1899, a Chicago Tribune article marveled at the laundry’s machines that could wash and iron “30,000 pieces in a day” and the “young women” who fed pieces through the tumbler and the mangler, folded them, and tied them in bundles. The encyclopedic 1893 book, The Town of Pullman, described the laundry facility in even more gushing terms: a structure “supplied with every modern convenience for the comfort of employes [sic],” rooms buzzing with “busy girls, all wearing white caps and white aprons while attending to their multifarious duties” and spotlessly clean linens that 'when handled by the girls, [were] sweet and clean.'" more »

"According to Paul Wolfram [Yale] ’21 PhD now a postdoc with the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland, the study shows that 'the elephant in the room is the supply chain of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, not that of electric vehicles'. He notes that the faster we switch to electric vehicles, the better — at least in countries with a sufficiently decarbonized electricity supply, like the US Yale economics professor Ken Gillingham, whose research has focused extensively on alternative energy adoption in transportation, says this research provides a better understanding of how comprehensive carbon pricing — which includes the full supply chain — can shift consumers toward electric vehicles." more »

Once more an updated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit Dec. 25, 2021, to serve as the premier deep space observatory for the next decade. The Webb telescope’s revolutionary technology will explore every phase of cosmic history – from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between. Webb will reveal new and unexpected discoveries, and help humankind understand the origins of the universe and our place in it. more »