Asia-Pacific

A Taiwanese inventor is proposing a rail system that never stops for passengers, virtually eliminating delays. Follow the full story link to see the video.

Will laser-projected pedestrians make crossing the street safer in South Korea?

American-style malls are cropping up in Siberia, and gobbling up land, to enable once-isolated Russians to consume in ways that might have been unimaginable a generation ago.

In the mid-1980s New Zealand sold its national rail assets to private industry in hopes of developing a profitable, efficient rail network. With deteriorating infrastructure and a desire for greener transit, the government has decided to buy it back.

"Cat cafes" are popping up all over Tokyo, giving patrons the company of a cat -- without the burden of actually owning one. There are at least seven cat cafes in Tokyo.

This 12-part video series from Vice gives a gritty look at the Texas-sized patch of plastic flotsam that has formed in the Pacific Ocean -- and the global environmental and health hazards it presents.

These two videos show the downside of high public transit ridership.

South Korea's new president has proposed the engineering and construction of a huge cross-country canal -- a plan he hopes will revive much of the country's depressed villages and offer an attractive venue for tourists and shipping companies.

As commuters face delays and frustrations with aging infrastructure, the government in Auckland, New Zealand has announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in its regional rail system.

Young people in New Zealand aren't taking up careers in planning, which is causing problems for many cities, and has developers upset about slow processing times.

A woman in Russia returned home form vacation recently to an empty plot of land. Her home was mistakenly demolished as developers readied a site for new construction.

The Pentagon and an international consortium are investigating the feasibility of 'beaming back' solar energy from a network of space-based satellites and Pacific island-based antennae that could begin operating as early as 2012.

Vice Magazine presents this photo essay on a cemetery in Manila that is heavily populated with both the living and the dead. More than 10,000 families make this graveyard their home.

Smaller cities in rural areas of Japan are being gutted out, as big box centers continue to sprout up outside cities.

Many Japanese cities are in decline, and people there are counting on the new prime minister to put a stop to it.

A vortex of winds has concentrated garbage and plastic flotsam into a huge island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- an unintentionally man-made mass that is growing at a rapid pace.

Road designers in Japan have created a system of specialized grooves on highway pavement that produce melodies when cars drive over them at certain speeds.

This post from Salon shows a video of a train that travels right through a market in Bangkok.

Rapid building and public works projects are destroying much of the natural environment in Japan, a country that lays 25 to 30 times more concrete than the U.S.

A $7 billion new town is being planned in Vietnam, across the Red River from capital city Hanoi. And though the creation of thousands of new houses is welcomed, many are concerned about development along the sensitive riverfront.