Carbon Chemist

Tag: travel

  • When You Call a Restaurant, You Might Be Chatting With an AI Host

    When You Call a Restaurant, You Might Be Chatting With an AI Host

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    A pleasant female voice greets me over the phone. “Hi, I’m an assistant named Jasmine for Bodega,” the voice says. “How can I help?”

    “Do you have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds a little sad as she tells me that unfortunately, the San Francisco–based Vietnamese restaurant doesn’t have outdoor seating. But her sadness isn’t the result of her having a bad day. Rather, her tone is a feature, a setting.

    Jasmine is a member of a new, growing clan: the AI voice restaurant host. If you recently called up a restaurant in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are you have spoken to one of Jasmine’s polite, calculated competitors.

    In the sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality phone agents haven’t been getting as much attention as consumer-based generative AI tools like Gemini Live and ChatGPT-4o. And yet, the niche is heating up, with multiple emerging startups vying for restaurant accounts across the US. Last May, voice ordering AI garnered much attention at the National Restaurant Association’s annual food show. Bodega, the high-end Vietnamese restaurant I called, used Maitre-D AI, which launched primarily in the Bay Area in 2024. Newo, another new startup, is currently rolling its software out at numerous Silicon Valley restaurants. One-year-old RestoHost is now answering calls at 150 restaurants in the Atlanta metro area, and Slang, a voice AI company that started focusing on restaurants exclusively during the Covid-19 pandemic and announced a $20 million funding round in 2023, is gaining ground in the New York and Las Vegas markets.

    All of them offer a similar service: an around-the-clock AI phone host that can answer generic questions about the restaurant’s dress code, cuisine, seating arrangements, and food allergy policies. They can also assist with making, altering, or canceling a reservation. In some cases, the agent can direct the caller to an actual human, but according to RestoHost cofounder Tomas Lopez-Saavedra, only 10 percent of the calls result in that. Each platform offers the restaurant subscription tiers that unlock additional features, and some of the systems can speak multiple languages.

    But who even calls a restaurant in the era of Google and Resy? According to some of the founders of AI voice host startups, many customers do, and for various reasons. “Restaurants get a high volume of phone calls compared to other businesses, especially if they’re popular and take reservations,” says Alex Sambvani, CEO and cofounder of Slang, which currently works with everyone from the Wolfgang Puck restaurant group to Chick-fil-A to the fast-casual chain Slutty Vegan. Sambvani estimates that in-demand establishments receive between 800 and 1,000 calls per month. Typical callers tend to be last-minute bookers, tourists and visitors, older people, and those who do their errands while driving.

    Matt Ho, the owner of Bodega SF, confirms this scenario. “The phones would ring constantly throughout service,” he says. “We would receive calls for basic questions that can be found on our website.” To solve this issue, after shopping around, Ho found that Maitre-D was the best fit. Bodega SF became one of the startup’s earliest clients in May, and Ho even helped the founders with trial and error testing prior to launch. “This platform makes the job easier for the host and does not disturb guests while they’re enjoying their meal,” he says.

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  • Burning Man Is Over, but Regional Burns Keep the Party Going Year-Round

    Burning Man Is Over, but Regional Burns Keep the Party Going Year-Round

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    These regionals give out grants for art, though the creations are not as monumental or abundant as at the Big Burn. People do wear fantastic costumes, but more for their own fun, not to get a pic for the ‘gram.

    For shelter, people tent camp, stay in yurts, or bring RVs. “It’s a gifting, interactive amusement park for adults,” Levy says of these regionals. “If you want to meet cool people and have interactive experiences and dance, it’s perfect. Because it doesn’t have the challenges.”

    Pacific Northwest Burns

    Latimer, who lives in the Seattle area, favors SOAK, held over Memorial Day weekend outside Portland in the Tygh Valley for about 2,500 people, and Critical NW outside of Seattle in July for about 1,300 people. The weather for both is usually gorgeous.

    This past year, Latimer brought her “typical retired boomer” dad to SOAK to help build the effigy structure for burning. “He was blown away to see that many people of all ages and all walks of life are drawn to burns, which goes against the typical, young, rich, attractive stereotype that’s prevalent on social media.”

    At both, it’s easy to walk around and see all the art and meet up with local burners that are active in Seattle and Portland. “You can easily plan multi-camp shenanigans and events ahead of time, which makes it all the more fun,” Latimer says.

    On the site for Critical NW, she says, “you literally get to frolic around the forest with your fellow weirdos and not have to deal with cleaning up massive amounts of playa dust once you’re home.”

    Element 11

    June in Utah

    Even though it’s small—about 2,000 attendees—this event has an excellent reputation among burners. “The vibe deserves a standing ovation,” says Candice Snow.

    Element 11 is held on Stargazer Ranch, private land that was bought for this purpose by a group of burners, so there are year-round structures, instead of everything being dismantled and burned at the end. “The landscape of Stargazer very closely resembles the conditions of Black Rock City,” Snow says. In fact, there is only one effigy burn, because of the arid, brushy conditions.

    Attendees also report that curious current and former Mormons find their way to the festival. “I noticed quite a few are ex-LDS,” says Rowdy. “They tend to let loose their inhibitions.”

    “Watching their transformation over the week is kind of magic,” Snow agrees.

    There’s less prep to do for the five days of Element 11, though you do need to bring shelter, food, and plenty of hydration. While a bike can add to your experience, you don’t need one to get around.

    Fuego Austral

    February in Argentina

    “I would definitely recommend Fuego Austral to someone who is burnt out from Burning Man,” says Daniel Hugo Miceli, who is based between Buenos Aires and Berlin. “FA is the best of Latin America mixed with a burn—the people are super warm, friendly, and there is plenty of maté, asados [grilled meats], and an overall welcoming atmosphere that starts to feel a bit like a family.”

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  • Somehow, the Dog Situation on Airplanes Has Gotten Even Wilder

    Somehow, the Dog Situation on Airplanes Has Gotten Even Wilder

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    But now in-cabin pets are subject to the same kind of strict entry requirements—and paperwork—as pets in cargo holds, with special attention paid to vaccination records from 96 countries with high risk of dog rabies, including China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and Mexico.

    For Kimberly Graner, the chief operating officer of pet boarding and pet shipping businesses Kennel Club LAX and Tailwind Global Pet, the rule changes have led to lots more time negotiating with foreign representatives about vaccination records. The new rules changes are important, she says, but it’s taken time for airlines, passengers, and global government workers to adapt. “I foresee even more changes in the next year,” she says.

    Airlines Play Cat(and Dog)ch-Up

    More change is saying something. In 2020, the US federal government began to take a stronger stance on pets in the passenger cabin when it started to crack down on passengers using improperly obtained “emotional support” status to transport their pets on airlines. The rules were prompted by a flurry of complaints about pet misbehavior in the air and by media reports of the less-than-traditional support animals that had taken to the sky. Perhaps you remember the emotional support peacock, or the emotional support squirrel, or the (truly tragic!) tale of the emotional support hamster. These guidelines restrict free, in-cabin access to properly trained support animals, and require specific forms to be completed days before a flight.

    Many US airlines now permit smaller pets to travel in kennels in a cabin for a fee—though those fees have changed, too. In April, United Airlines raised its in-cabin pet prices by $25, to $150.

    A United spokesperson, Charlie Hobart, declined to answer questions about the fee change, but wrote in an email that “our in-cabin pet fees are fairly typical for the industry.” (Fees generally range from $95 to $150 per flight.)

    American Airlines, meanwhile, shifted its policy to allow those who travel with pets to bring more baggage on their flight. In a written statement, Timothy Wetzel, a spokesperson for American Airlines, wrote that the company “made the change to provide a more convenient and comfortable experience to customers whose pets fly American.”

    dogs on a plane

    Dogs get comfy on a Bark Air flight.

    Photograph: Joe Gall; BARK Air

    In the flying pet chaos, the dog product company Bark has sniffed out a business opportunity. In May, the company launched Bark Air, an airline for dogs, which uses charter flights to transport dogs (and sometimes their owners) on two routes, between New York and Los Angeles and New York and London. So far, the service has transported some 266 dogs on 33 flights, with trips costing $6,000 for the Los Angeles route and $8,500 to travel to the UK.

    Bark Air’s trips are “dog-first,” says Dave Stangle, Bark’s vice president of brand marketing, with pooch-friendly touches including treats, custom “calming” doggy blankets and pillows sprayed with pheromones, an in-flight “just in case bag” (with pee pads and cleaning materials, just, you know, in case), and a complimentary dog spa service, complete with warm towel and nose balm (it’s drying up there!) at the conclusion of each trip.

    Despite all the changes, Stangle says Bark only expects interest in pet flight to go up. “We do see a future where traveling with your dog is the same as traveling with your child,” he says.

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  • 4 Tools That Make It Easier to Write While Traveling—Wherever You Go

    4 Tools That Make It Easier to Write While Traveling—Wherever You Go

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    The shift to remote work has made it easier to stay productive while traveling. We have Slack and Zoom, and there are time zone calculators on our shared calendars. But more than ever, it’s especially easy to work remotely if you job involves a lot of writing. Whether that means sending hundreds of emails, reporting and writing articles, or composing newsletters for your subscribers, a laptop and an internet connection are all you need to feel properly set up.

    But if you think about it, it’s not always that easy. If you’re working while traveling, this time spent writing on your computer isn’t happening behind a neat, tidy office desk where you feel focused and comfortable. It’s happening while you wait around at the noisy airport, sit in the back of a lurching car, or lounge in some soulless hotel lobby with terrible music.

    But there are ways to make writing on the road more comfortable for your body and your brain. Here are four must-have items to help you successfully keep those words flowing, no matter where you are.

    A Portable Power Bank

    Every writer’s worst nightmare is your device powering down when you’re in the middle of tapping away on the keyboard. Did it save? Is your work lost? Most airports, hotels, and other public spots have charging ports available, but these outlets are often scarce, crowded, broken, or difficult to get to. I’ve had to swallow my pride plenty of times and sit on a dirty airport floor just to access the plug socket.

    It’s best to plan for the worst by keeping a charged power bank on you at all times. The one I travel with is a hefty red brick with two USB ports that takes hours to charge up completely, so I make sure to fill it days before a trip. I’m willing to endure the weight and bulk of the battery in exchange for the power to completely charge my devices multiple times. The best power bank for you will vary depending on your needs, but we have a list of options here to help you choose.

    A USB Hub Rich With Ports

    I have yet to meet a laptop that had enough USB ports built in. Until someone engineers that unicorn into existence, take a hub with you to ensure you can plug in everything you need no matter where you are. USB hubs are generally small and portable, so you can comfortably carry one with the rest of your peripherals.

    I prefer a hub with four extra ports to accommodate my backup drive, microphone, headphone charger and other necessities, but you can find hubs that have more or fewer ports, SD card readers, and even headphone jacks. When you’re counting how many ports you’ll need, add one or two to the total in case a port goes bad later; it’s better to be overprepared than to be lacking in USB ports at a critical moment. Check out some USB hubs and docks here if you aren’t sure what’s best for you.

    Noise-Canceling Headphones to Make the World Go Away

    When writing on the road, silence is at a premium. Some people can put poetry together even with a screaming toddler three feet away from them, but I am not one of those people.

    Having noise-canceling headphones has meant the difference between being able to focus on the writing at hand and being stuck listening to everything but my own thoughts. When I’m on a deadline and need quiet, I lean into noise-canceling technology. Sometimes, I turn my headphones on and just listen to the silence, no music or podcast required. I prefer the over-ear type of headphones since they thoroughly encase my ears in blissful peace—and I’m not a fan of things being inside my ears. If you’re not sure what type of noise-canceling technology is right for you, check out our list of options here.

    A Way to Record Thoughts on the Move

    The best ideas rarely strike when you’re sitting comfortably at your laptop, hands on the keyboard. They usually come when you’re racing through a train station or waiting in line for a bagel. You can tell yourself “don’t forget this,” but chances are good that the idea will slip from your mind before you have a chance to write it down. To prevent this tragedy, arm yourself with a way to record your thoughts on the fly.

    I use a speech-to-text app on my smartphone, which is always within reach. In seconds, I can be the person at the coffee shop mumbling “bluebottle jellyfish, medicinal uses” urgently into her hand, and then the idea is safely preserved in text form on my phone and backed up to the cloud. If you don’t feel comfortable voicing your ideas in public, a notes app or even a pocket notebook can work, but hands-free is often the more flexible choice when you’re out and about.

    If you have to write anything for your job, you’re a writer. If you’re a writer, you write, no matter where you are. Be sure you’re prepared for every train station, grocery store, and long-haul flight with the tools to help you assemble incoherent thoughts into successful messages.

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  • The EU Has New Carry-On Luggage Rules. Here’s What to Know Before You Fly

    The EU Has New Carry-On Luggage Rules. Here’s What to Know Before You Fly

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    If you’re taking a flight to any country that’s a member of the European Union—and there are 27 of them—then there are some updated carry-on luggage rules you need to make yourself aware of before you turn up at the airport. When you pass through security, agents will ask you to remove liquids and electronics from your carry-on so they can be scanned.

    In theory, these rule changes are only temporary: They’re a stopgap solution while we wait for the next generation of security scanners to go fully live. The implementation of these C3 scanners, which can properly analyze liquids and electronics so they don’t have to be taken out of your hand luggage, has been delayed beyond the original June 2024 deadline.

    The official implementation date for these new carry-on baggage rules is September 1, 2024, so they are already in effect. There’s no fixed date as to when they will be relaxed, because there are a lot of factors at play. It’s likely the rules will be in place until at least the middle of 2025.

    Which Airports Are Affected?

    To be clear, these aren’t brand-new rules for your carry-on luggage. What’s happening is that EU airports are reverting to the previous set of rules about what types of things need to be taken out of your carry-on for inspection when you pass through security.

    All airports in EU countries are affected, as are some airports in the UK (including Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and Manchester) and airports in Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.

    Strictly speaking, only airports that have C3 scanners installed should be rolling back their rules; other airports that never installed the C3 scanners have continued to follow the old procedures. The rollout of the new tech has been costlier and taken longer than expected, and there are still bugs in the system—so the old security rules are once again required.

    Officially, it’s a “tech issue” with the new equipment: Although the machines have been installed in a number of airports, it seems their scanning capabilities aren’t quite up to the high level required. While that gets sorted out, the scanners can’t be relied upon to spot dangerous contents in luggage.

    Considering getting items in and out of bags always takes time, and bearing in mind that some passengers aren’t going to know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, you might want to leave some extra time in your schedule to allow for queues and delays.

    What Are the Rules?

    To guard against the threat of explosives, all liquids and electronics will need to be taken out of bags and scanned separately. In addition, liquids should be inside containers no bigger than 100 milliliters (3.4 liquid ounces) and are to be placed in a clear plastic bag of around 20 x 20 cm (7.9 x 7.9 inches).

    This “100 ml rule” applies to all liquids, including (but not limited to) drinks, semiliquid foods like soups, cosmetics and toiletries, sprays, toothpaste, shower gel, hair gel, and contact lens solution. As usual, these liquids and typical electronics can be put in your checked luggage with no issue.

    Exceptions to the 100-ml rule are sometimes made for those traveling with small babies and for those with special dietary and health requirements (including people who need to carry medication). If you fit into these categories, you must check in advance with the airport, and if you’re taking medication with you then you may need a doctor’s note.

    For seasoned travelers, this is all going to be pretty familiar—but hopefully, as the new baggage scanners start to come online, the security checkpoint process at airports should become more streamlined and faster overall. If you’re in any doubt about the rules, check with your airline and the airport involved close to the time you’ve traveling.

    Finally, a note on something that isn’t changing, at least not yet: While there have been rumors that the EU is going to apply rules on standardized case sizes for carry-on luggage, nothing has been decided. The idea has been discussed, but for the time being there’s no single size standard.

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  • Billionaire Finally Launches on First Private Space-Walk Mission

    Billionaire Finally Launches on First Private Space-Walk Mission

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    One of the most ambitious space tourism missions in history has launched, with the all-commercial crew set to hit a number of milestones during its five days in space, including the first-ever privately funded human space walk.

    The mission, called Polaris Dawn, took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today, Tuesday, September 10, at 5.23 am Eastern Time. The four-person crew, traveling inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle atop one of the California company’s Falcon 9 rockets, comprises Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the mission, SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, and pilot Scott Poteet.

    Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says the mission’s pioneering space walk is a “gimmick” in some respects. “But if you look at it as developing the capability, independent of NASA, to do space walks, that is potentially important,” he says.

    Initially set to launch at the end of August, Polaris Dawn was pushed back first due to technical concerns and weather, and later because of a botched landing of another Falcon 9 rocket, which resulted in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) temporarily grounding the Falcon 9 fleet. The crew remained in quarantine for the duration but kept busy with additional training.

    Post-launch, the Crew Dragon spacecraft was placed into an orbit that will take it as high as 1,400 kilometers above Earth’s surface, making this the farthest astronauts will have traveled from Earth since the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972, and the highest altitude ever achieved by a woman. “This is the farthest humans have traveled since the last time humans walked on the moon,” Isaacman said in a prelaunch briefing at the Kennedy Space Center on August 19.

    Isaacman, the CEO of the US payment firm Shift4, flew to space previously in September 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission. That mission, which also ran on a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle, at a cost of somewhere up to $200 million, showcased the ability of SpaceX to allow the ultrarich to pay for the ultimate thrill, a trip to orbit as a space tourist. (The cost of the Polaris Dawn mission has not been revealed.)

    Space tourism missions have happened multiple times before, beginning in 2001 when the US businessman Dennis Tito became the first paying customer aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station (ISS). In the past few years, dozens of paying customers of companies such as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have also taken brief suborbital “hops” into space lasting minutes.

    But Crew Dragon, partially funded by nearly $5 billion of NASA money to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS in the wake of the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011, brings a whole new angle to such missions. The vehicle, about as roomy as a large car with accommodation for up to seven passengers, can launch bespoke flights to Earth orbit, not just to the ISS, and enable new types of missions.

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  • What Cancún’s Tourists Don’t See Is a Sprawling Concrete Jungle

    What Cancún’s Tourists Don’t See Is a Sprawling Concrete Jungle

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    This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

    The wide mowed lawns and leafy trees, the sports fields shining under their illuminated lights, the bouncy castles in the children’s play areas—especially the bouncy castles—are what Celia Pérez Godínez envies. These are the trappings of the wealthy neighborhood she travels to every day as a domestic worker in Cancún. Pérez envies the rich.

    She tells me this sitting on a rotten wooden bench one August afternoon, her 7-year-old son getting his scooter stuck on the broken path here many miles away in the north of the city, in a tiny park. Full of garbage and wild vegetation, it’s a short distance from where Pérez lives, close to the city outskirts. As we talk, a homeless person in the background shouts and laughs as if at a joke only he understands.

    Pérez is a 33-year-old single mother from San Marcos, Guatemala. She migrated in 2013 to Cancún, Mexico’s over-promoted and hugely popular tourist destination. She rarely has enough time and money to go to the beach and cannot find green areas or decent, safe public spaces for her son to play, having to make do with the few parks, like this, that are available. This is not the life she expected. “You hear that Cancún is wonderful, but when you get here … it’s a disappointment.”

    At 54 years old, Cancún is the youngest city in Mexico. It was designed from scratch in the 1970s as a new holiday destination in the country. In this respect, it’s been a wild success. But as an urban project, it is a failure. Designed for 200,000 people, the population of its urban sprawl now exceeds 1 million. Before, much of this area was jungle; today there are hundreds of hotels. Accelerated real-estate development has bitten into the surrounding vegetation year after year.

    This growth has been an environmental nightmare but also a social one, giving vastly unequal benefits to the city’s richer and poorer inhabitants. According to recent research by Christine McCoy, an academic at the University of the Caribbean, most people in Cancún live without the minimum green areas or public spaces needed for proper recreation, leisure, rest, or socializing. This is especially true in those regions where the most vulnerable live.

    Click play to see Cancún’s urban development from 1984 to 2022.

    This inequality has evolved despite Cancún’s rapid expansion consuming huge amounts of green space. Between 2001 and 2021, the surrounding region lost at least 30,000 hectares of jungle, according to data from Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. On the land ripped from the jungle there are now residential and hotel projects. And according to data seen by WIRED, plenty more developents are on the way. At the federal level, since 2018 the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources has received 40 requests for further land use change in the area. If approved, 650 more hectares of jungle will disappear.

    Data obtained through freedom of information shows what urban development projects have been processed over this period, these ranging from 2,247 tiny, popular housing units on the one hand to a 20-story, 429-room all-inclusive luxury hotel. Crucially, none of these include applications for public parks or green areas to be developed or improved, in a city that is already bursting at the seams, having exceeded its tourist carrying capacity for more than a decade.

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  • Best Overlanding Gear (2024): Tried and Tested Storage, Shovels, and Coolers

    Best Overlanding Gear (2024): Tried and Tested Storage, Shovels, and Coolers

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    Overlanding, off-road touring, four-wheeling—whatever you call it, traveling America’s back roads, the real back roads, the ones that aren’t paved and are rarely maintained, is an almost guaranteed adventure. Overlanding will take you out there, whether it’s Arizona’s famed Senator Highway, remote beaches in Mexico’s Baja peninsula, or rolling across the Australian outback.

    However you define it, you’re going to need more than an awesome rig. That’s why we put together this guide to all the overlanding gear you need to make sure you and your vehicle make it back safely. Get what you need and load up your old Jeep, Land Cruiser, tricked-out Tacoma, or full on Unimog and get out there.

    We bring you this expertise as two enthusiasts of backroad travel. Scott lives in an RV full-time and is a former Jeep owner, while Martin is a weekend warrior who’s on his second 80 series Land Cruiser. Don’t see anything you like? Be sure to check out our other buying guides, including our Best Sleeping Bags, Best Camp Stoves, and Best Tents roundups.

    Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting that’s too important to ignore for just $2.50 $1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Subscribe Today.

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  • Ski Resorts Are Stockpiling Snow to Get Through Warm Winters

    Ski Resorts Are Stockpiling Snow to Get Through Warm Winters

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    “We provide 100 percent snow security,” says Antti Lauslahti, Snow Secure’s CEO, proudly. “Any ski resort can start the season at a specific date.”

    He adds that the system has performed well even when summer heat waves push temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Beneath the blankets, temperatures do not exceed roughly 1 or 2 degrees Celsius. Snow Secure, and its clients, can check that their icy stockpiles remain cool thanks to real-time temperature sensors.

    Some snow does, inevitably, melt and trickle away during the summer months, but Lauslahti says his firm aims to ensure that losses do not exceed 30 percent of the original pile. Mustonen has observed this level of performance at Levi. For now, the approach appears resilient even in the face of increasingly hot European summers. “We haven’t yet seen the temperature where it would totally melt,” says Lauslahti.

    It’s not just ski resorts that can make use of stored snow. One of Snow Secure’s clients is a timber-processing plant. Staff there keep large pieces of wood under a thick layer of snow topped with the blankets. It keeps the timber from drying out too much in the summer, ensuring that it stays fresh and easy to cut, says Lauslahti.

    Elizabeth Burakowski at the University of New Hampshire says that, in general, snow storage is “a great strategy to address the uncertainty that we have when living in a climate that’s warming rapidly.” She adds that ski resorts should consider using electric-powered snow-grooming machines, to reduce emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.

    Snow Secure is keen to promote its blanket system. But there is another way of covering up a big ol’ heap of snow and insulating it for months on end. And it has been used for centuries. You can just spread sawdust or wood chips over the snow instead.

    “It’s an elegant technology,” says Kjell Skogsberg, who works in the renewable energy industry. “It’s really reliable and simple.”

    Back in 2001, Skogsberg and a colleague published a paper about a snow-storage system they had designed for a hospital in Sundsvall, in eastern Sweden. “It’s like a pit with a slightly sloping bottom where you dump the snow,” he explains. The snow is topped with a 200-millimeter-thick covering of wood chips to prevent it from melting too quickly. Then, over the summer, meltwater gently flows to an outlet at the bottom corner of the pit, passing through filters that remove any grit or dirt, and finally the chilly water heads to a heat exchanger. This helps to lower the temperature of a separate flow of water that gets pumped through the hospital’s cooling system.

    “That is used for air conditioning and also process cooling—for instance, X-ray machines,” says Skogsberg. The system is still in use today, he adds, and it can completely cover the energy demand for summer cooling at the hospital, which, at 1 gigawatt hour for the May–August period, is significant. Skogsberg is currently in discussions with an energy company that might build a version of the technology for a district cooling system. Airports, which have a lot of outdoor space that could also be used to store snow, might similarly find this approach useful, suggests Skogsberg.

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  • Waymo Is Picking Up at the Airport. That’s a Big Deal

    Waymo Is Picking Up at the Airport. That’s a Big Deal

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    On Tuesday, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle developer Waymo said it would begin operating all-day, curbside pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona. The announcement came with little fanfare—a post on X. But it signals that after years of delay, self-driving vehicles might be (literally) moving in the right direction.

    The new curbside airport service sends a good signal about Waymo’s business, says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst with Gartner. “The airport is the primary destination and departure point for any sort of mobility service, whether it’s a cab, shuttle bus—or an autonomous robocab,” he says. Almost a decade ago, then-upstarts Uber and Lyft fought hard to gain access to airports. Less price-sensitive business travelers, families lugging bags, and anyone who doesn’t want to spend to park at the airport all want easy-to-access rides, making it an ideal place to base a taxi service.

    Even before all-day curbside service began, the airport was Waymo’s most popular destination in Phoenix, says Brad Gillette, Waymo’s market lead in the city. Waymo has operated self-driving vehicles in Arizona since 2017, and began offering rides to Phoenix’s airport at the end of 2022. For the first year of service, passengers could only get picked up and dropped off from the stations along the airport’s “Sky Train”—areas with less intense traffic. Late last year, Waymo began to offer nighttime curbside service between 10 pm and 6 am, also periods in which the airport was less hectic. Now, the service is open anytime, to anyone who downloads the company’s Waymo One app.

    The company says it has served nearly 100,000 rides to and from the airport since it first started its station service nearly two years ago, and is now serving thousands of travelers per week.

    The airport departures and arrivals curbs are also a really difficult place to drive. Cars pulling in and out, hunting for passengers, operating in tight spaces—this sort of thing is hard enough for a human. Gillette says it took Waymo a year of testing to ensure the company’s technology “can predict and react appropriately, with a certain level of assertiveness, in order to pull into the right place at the right time.”

    Waymos will pick up and drop off from designated terminal rideshare and electric vehicle pickup areas, Eric Everts, a public information officer for the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said in an email. Through Waymo’s app, passengers will be given specific dwell times to load into vehicles, and the cars will leave them behind if they don’t hit the deadline, Everts wrote—implying that traffic cops won’t have to hassle the driverless vehicles to move along.

    Bumpy Ride

    Last summer, curbside pickup and dropoff became a point of contention as Waymo and competitor Cruise both applied to begin full-time paid passenger robotaxi service in San Francisco—to, basically, officially take on Uber and Lyft in the city where those services were born. In letters to the regulator overseeing the permitting, the city of San Francisco said it was concerned that robotaxis weren’t pulling close enough to curbs to pick up and drop off passengers.

    For California regulators, who control autonomous vehicle operations in the state, the concern wasn’t much of a sticking point: A commission approved the permits in August 2023 . (Cruise has since had its permit to operate rides in the state revoked, after state officials alleged the company concealed details of an incident in which an autonomous vehicle dragged a pedestrian some 20 feet.) But for some city officials and residents, robotaxis’ behavior at the curb was enough to say, no thanks.

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