Science & Technology

A new history of the Wright Brothers argues it was Wilbur who solved the problem of manned flight, and that his brother Orville was little more than an assistant.

Doug Thaler of Infrastructure Preservation Corporation on using robotic testing technology (including drones) to improve infrastructure inspection results.

Lois Durso of Stop Underrides on side underride accidents—which are frequently fatal for motorists, pedestrians, motorcyclists and bicyclists—and what can be done to make them less dangerous.

Marianne Karth—founder of annaleahmary.com and advocate for the Stop Underrides Act—on how we can prevent truck underride and make side and rear underride accidents more survivable.

Perry Ponder’s AngelWing side underride guards—available at airflowdeflector.com—have been shown to prevent underride in crash tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

A now well-known, publicly-traded oilfield-service firm was the first to fracture a well hydraulically, using a mixture of napalm and gasoline at the Hugoton gas field in western Kansas in 1949.

Collision Safety Consulting’s TrailerGuard system aims to reduce the number of injuries and deaths caused by side and rear underride truck accidents.

Daniel Raimi—senior research associate at Resources for the Future—on the risks, benefits and uncertainties of fracking and the shale revolution.

Everyone has heard about fracking and its impact on communities where drilling takes place. Few have considered the impact of industrial-scale sand mining, even though so-called frac sand is a key ingredient in the hydraulic fracturing process.

How and why over half the hemophiliacs in the U.S. were infected with HIV just a few years after the virus entered the blood supply.

On March 27, 1964—Good Friday—the most powerful earthquake in the history of North America struck the state of Alaska.

Kate Moore tells the century-old story of the girls who worked in radium-dial factories—young women who became victims of corporate greed and died painful, horrific deaths, but not before pursuing legal action that helped improve workplace safety.

Marine engineer Bernie Dohnt planned to sink his fully-functional, 3D-printed, 1/72-scale model of Titanic before changing course and selling it to Titanic: The Exhibition.

Thousands of snow geese perished after landing in the toxic waters of Butte, Montana's Berkeley Pit. But the birds may not have died in vain.

Lessons learned from the St. Francis Dam failure—and its impact on the civil engineering profession at-large.

Prior to the negotiations that produced the framework of a nuclear pact, the United States attempted to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program using a sophisticated digital weapon—Stuxnet.

Is the greatest threat to our privacy the NSA, or data brokers and Big Business?

Lessons learned from a little-known construction accident, which threatened the completion of the world’s longest single-entrance tunnel, as well as a decade-long effort to clean up Boston Harbor.

Donnie Eichar explains how Kármán vortex street might have created the conditions that led to tragedy on Russia’s Holatchahl mountain.

The U.S. Metric Association deserves recognition for its effort to promote increased usage of the modernized metric system. It’s ultimate objective? Complete conversion.