MINNEAPOLIS — Living with a disability can bring an assortment of challenges. Among them are healthcare costs, reliable transportation, lack of accessibility in and around buildings, and housing that allows people to live comfortably and safely. 

When it comes to places that package the above needs, Minneapolis does a great job. In fact, personal finance website WalletHub says the Mini-Apple is the second-best city in America for people with disabilities to live. 

To determine the rankings, WalletHub researchers compared 182 cities – including 150 with the largest populations in the U.S. – across three key dimensions: Economy, Health Care and Quality of Life. 

Each of those three categories was then broken down into 33 metrics, which included comparisons like housing affordability, median earnings for those with disabilities, cost of a doctor visit, average monthly insurance premium, wheelchair-accessible restaurants per capita and share of accessible homes listed on Redfin.com. 

Minneapolis finished second behind Scottsdale, Ariz., largely on health care. Researchers found the average monthly health insurance premium in Minneapolis is $337, the second-lowest in the country. The community also features the sixth-best public hospitals and the eighth-most hospitals per capita.

The city has also made strides with accessibility, ranking as the 22nd-best city for wheelchair-accessible grocery stores and arts and entertainment establishments per capita. Minneapolis also has the fifth-most wheelchair-accessible trails, which is important considering Minnesota’s outdoor lifestyle and data indicates over 98% of residents live within half a mile of a park.

Finally, over 27% of homes listed for sale in Minneapolis are wheelchair-accessible, the 11th-most in the country.

“More than one in four U.S. adults live with a disability, so it’s extremely important for cities to prioritize becoming a safe, welcoming and affordable place for this demographic,” explained WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo. “The best cities have highly-accessible public facilities and housing, high-quality medical care, and an affordable cost of living for people on a fixed income.”

Minnesota largely gets it, as proven by the fact that St. Paul finished fifth on the list of best cities for people with disabilities. Others in the top five include Columbus, Ohio (third) and St. Louis, Mo. (fourth). WalletHub’s bottom 5 cities for the disabled are Juneau, Alaska; Montgomery, Ala.; Jackson, Miss.; Pearl City, Hawaii; and Gulfport, Miss. 

For more on the study and how it was conducted, check out the WalletHub website. 

BEAUMONT, Texas — One lucky Beaumont man is $1 million dollars richer after purchasing a winning lottery ticket at Buzzy Bee gas station near downtown and is now giving back.

“It was a $20 ticket,” said the winner, who wishes to remain anonymous.

He walked into the gas station on MLK Parkway to purchase his favorite drink and a lottery ticket. Little did he know, he’d walk away a millionaire.

“I couldn’t believe it. I had to get my phone out and scan the ticket and it come up, I won a million,” he said.

RELATED: Beaumont resident wins $1M on Texas Lottery scratch-off ticket

After playing the lottery for 30 years, the winner says he’s never won anything like this.

“I sat in my chair all night, didn’t sleep with my ticket in my hand. Then 8:00 in the morning I was at the lottery claim center in Beaumont. About 30 minutes, later walked out with a check,” he said.

The winner, who is a 66-year-old retired Navy veteran says after taxes he will pocket around $630,000. He plans to invest most of the money.

“Tomorrow I’m buying $500,000 worth of stocks and bonds and keeping the rest,” he said.

He also decided to pay it forward to the man who helped him win.

“When I first started buying them I told myself that if I ever hit big, I was going to give the clerk that sold me the ticket some of those winnings,” he said.

He has this message for fellow players. 

“Players out there, just endeavor to persevere. It’s all luck you just gotta buy them at the right time,” he said.

WAYZATA, Minn. — Finding and solving water quality problems in the Land of 10,000 Lakes may soon have a new, lower-cost helper — an aquatic robot — that has been designed by and is undergoing tests at the University of Minnesota.

The autonomous underwater vehicle, which is named MeCO for Medium Cost Open Source Robot, costs under $10,000 to build versus more than 10 times that for a prebuilt machine. Open source means the design is out there for all, free of charge, offering multiple possibilities, including finding invasive species, inspecting ships, and locating trash.

“So, all you need to do is buy the parts, look at the manual — assembly manual — build it, and run it,” said Dr. Junaed Sattar, who is leading the University of Minnesota research.

In late August, Sattar and his team set up on the Wayzata Beach and Marina to conduct a field test on the device’s autonomous abilities. The robot is a unique-looking device with three clear tubes that contain the electronic brains and guts. If viewing from one end, the tubes are stacked like firewood with two on the bottom and one on the top, in essence, forming a triangle. Multiple propellers are mounted on the device.

The robot can also even “see.”

While preparing on the beach, Dave Widhalm, student research lead, asks a teammate, “Want me to restart the camera?”

Grant Schwidder, an undergraduate computer science major, who is running a connected laptop, later notes, “OK, cameras are updating.”

Once the robot is ready, Sattar and Widhalm don scuba gear, so they can “play” with the robot under water. They will also be joined by a red target, which looks orange under water, that Widhalm will tow to see if the robot can find and follow.  

“This is unique because it’s a diver’s buddy, as in, it does not only do autonomous behaviors; it  also understands the humans that it’s working with,” Sattar said.

Think about that. For example, a diver could point, and the robot would respond.

But on this August day, in the autonomous test, the human-robot interaction is limited to Widhalm towing the target to see what the robot sees and does.

Roughly an hour-and-a-half to the west of Lake Minnetonka on a New London lake, Jon Morales, program manager, Middle Fork Crow River Watershed District, who is doing his own water quality work in late August, is keenly interested in the aquatic robot testing.

“You can think of it as like sort of like a bloodhound or a heat-seeking drone,” Morales said.

Here on this stretch of the Middle Fork Crow River, Morales faces a water quality issue that he thinks could use the robot.

Annually, as ice leaves the river, a spring-only smell emerges, resulting from bacteria spending the winter gobbling river-bottom sediment that deposits above the New London dam.

“It smells. It smells pretty bad. So that hydrogen sulfide gas smells a lot like rotten eggs,” Morales said.

In exploring the annual odor, Morales collects data through a special probe and water samples at six locations — five of them monthly and one spot twice a month.

Still, under current methods, finding the odor-producing hot spots, which could ultimately lead to solutions, is tough.

“A better way would be amazing. You know this is a, it’s a time-consuming process. It’s tedious,” Morales said.

Back on Lake Minnetonka on that late August day, it takes mere minutes for the divers to see that the robot successfully chased the target.

Widhalm emerges from the water, proclaiming, “Worked great,” later adding, “Followed me around the entire time.”

“That was awesome; super nice,” Sattar declared.

During such field tests, Sattar has people like Jon Morales in mind.

“This is robots making jobs easier and extending the capabilities of the field experts, so Jon is one of those people,” Sattar said.

In the big picture, Sattar and his research team’s aquatic robot holds tremendous promise for Minnesota’s 10,000 jewels.

“So, the hope would be  that one day we can actually use this to clean up our lakes and keep them clean,” Widhalm said.