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Like a 1984 Ford Tempo spewing out exhaust and with headlights held together by duct tape, our country’s infrastructure need a little tune-up if it hopes to make it into the future without breaking down. From transportation to sewage, PopSci examines the technologies in the works that to overhaul the U.S. infrastructure.

Power

Underground Power Lines that heal themselves

Task: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve

Status: Commercially available in 10–15 years

Another way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput (about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones.

Transportation

Trackless Elevated Trains

Task: Add urban railways for a third the cost of conventional light rail

Status: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track

To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice, the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90 percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured as the rollers wind down.

Sewage

Turn Sludge into Electricity

Task: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, currently 1.5 percent of our total national power

Status: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015

Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas.

Full story at PopSci.

Plenty of future news tidbits.