Professor Antero Kukko on Canada’s Axel Heiberg island. To say it’s north is like saying Death Valley gets warm. Image credit American Surveyor

For a journey five years in the making, it lived up to the hype, not to mention pure North Canadian/Inuit serenity. Subsequent to the goals of erosion evaluation and “sediment transport in an event of a glacial lake outburst,” findings will be published in Nature Communications. 

Read the full account below, rich with history & hydrology alike, as recently featured in American Surveyor. 

Could digital twins be as ubiquitous as doorstep packages and Prime Day? Image credit CompositesWorld

Consumers got the same things they desired and would have still obtained otherwise, but Amazon removed friction. And that’s precisely what Hexagon’s Geosystems division and the Nemetschek Group envision for digital twins.

The two hold a mutual disdain for most old approaches in building, particularly those that yield bloated costs, lawsuits, injuries, you name it. Thus, with Nemetschek covering the software and Hexagon tending to digitizing, we may have just read the prologue to an epic ascent within AEC. 

TikTok ain’t the only Chinese software the U.S. is eyeing. Image credit Hesai

Last week, we relayed scientists’ mounting concerns about LiDAR’s hackability in self-driving vehicles. Welp, related concerns have made a beeline to the oval office.

The White House will begin investigating connected cars, on account of the burgeoning Chinese LiDAR & self-driving vehicle industries. Publicly-traded Chinese LiDAR company Hesai is front and center of the scrutiny, and has hired lobbyists in our nation’s capital as a result. 

Coastal erosion has spurred scientists to get creative in mapping habitat. Image credit Matthew J Thomas/Shutterstock

Shining a light on dwindling coastal habitat, the March volume of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing went full National Geographic. A cohort of Australian scientists introduced a “novel method” for mapping marine habitat, employing a seafood tower-sized combo of LiDAR/SDB, machine learning, remote sensing imagery, survey design, and a boatload more. 

The Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy in 2018. Image credit The Daily Sabah

The difficulty of assessing Italy’s Morandi Bridge collapse in 2018 isn’t identifying grave problems; it’s determining if one was the singular cause.

From lightning the morning of, to 1960s mafia corruption, the mythology surrounding the collapse grips international professionals and local citizens alike, to this day. There was no shortage of problems, and it would be irresponsible to claim that reality capture would have been a sure-fire means of total prevention. But given the confirmed structural flaws and paltry maintenance, maybe, just maybe, lives could have been saved.