Kickstart: Nicholas brings more rain, wind to Gulf Coast

After making landfall early today in Texas as a Category 1 hurricane, Nicholas has now been downgraded to a tropical storm, but the National Hurricane Center says it still can cause extensive damage along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Nicholas, the 14th named storm of the 2021 season, came ashore just southwest of Houston and is expected to bring up to 20 inches of rain in some areas. While the wind speed has dropped, gusts of 70 mph are possible, the center said. A storm surge also is expected along low-lying regions.

"The storm should move more slowly to the northeast later today and then eastward by Wednesday over Louisiana," the hurricane center said in a 5 a.m. update Tuesday. "Little motion is anticipated on Thursday."

Officials from the Harris County Sheriff's Office, which also covers Houston, reported flooded streets, downed trees and power lines.

The slow-moving storm could add to the potential for flash floods and urban flooding, forecasters noted, adding that floods could continue to be a problem across areas of the deep South during the next few days.

For now, Nicholas is not expected to do the kind of damage that Hurricane Ida did just two weeks ago, but utility crews are still struggling to repair power lines and other infrastructure in Louisiana. The damage has slowed works to restart production at some key resin plants.

How do you create a recognizable movement that even a "smart" sensor will recognize?

When Radac, a new joint venture of Adac Automotive — a maker of plastic auto modules — and Ainstein Inc., a Lawrence, Kan.-based startup specializing in smart radar systems and other advanced sensing technologies, began working on a sensor that would automatically open a vehicle's liftgate, the first thought was a simple wave.

But waving is hard to do when your hands are full. And if you're just waving goodbye as you leave home, you don't want car doors to pop open unexpectedly.

So as Sarah Kominek writes, the team at Radac went with something that is more of a dance.

"What we discovered through clinics and through development is the best way to have reliable and seamless entry is to step into a zone and step back out of the zone," Jack Prince, chief business development officer at Radac, said. "You're carrying something heavy, you walk up to the tailgate of your vehicle, and you deliberately step back out … and the vehicle actuates the liftgate for you."

Kind of like the Hokey Pokey?

Wind turbines have been gaining popularity in green energy talks, but there's one nagging problem related to them: The massive composite blades on those turbines have been considered impossible to recycle.

But wind power systems supplier Seimens Gamesa says that it has developed a blade that can be recovered and recycled at the end of its life.

The RecyclableBlade is made of a proprietary resin chemical structure that makes it possible to efficiently separate the resin from the other components at the end of the blade's working life, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.

The first 81-meter-long RecyclableBlades have been produced at the Siemens Gamesa blade factory in Aalborg, Denmark. The first of the new blades will go to an offshore wind power plant in Germany and will be producing energy by 2022. Talks are underway to put the blades to work in more locations as well.

Seimens Gamesa has set a goal of having fully recyclable turbines by 2040.