One day a decade ago, when Mark Pittman was a student at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City, he got caught in a snarl of traffic caused by a broken traffic light. The...
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress were looking for ways to fight the Great Depression, they drafted the Rural Electrification Act. Passed in 1936, the bill brought electricity to rural America and helped spark an economic recovery....
It was somewhere in the middle of Kansas when brutal crosswinds threatened to blow Katie Aguilar off her bike. Augilar had been surviving on little sleep and a diet of bagels, Bonk Breaker protein bars, and espresso shots, but she...
Like many places in the United States, the town of Perry, Iowa, started out almost as an accident. In 1849, a family from Delaware and another from Rhode Island parked their ox caravan in the area and decided that this...
Did you know that optical fibers embedded in aging infrastructure can enable proactive maintenance, improve safety, and extend its life? Learn more about this and other exciting infrastructure research and innovation in our new column The 5 Coolest Things in...
This article is the first in our new Engineering Wonders of The World series. The world’s highest railway bridge is in a rugged, mountainous area of northern India – and it is a sight to behold. Hovering 1,170 feet above...
In early May, you could hear a pin drop in Bangladesh’s classrooms and playgrounds, as the country’s schools and colleges closed in response to a ferocious heatwave. But there was no respite for rickshaw driver Mohammed Shameem, who had no...
Ever since she was a little girl in Canada, in the early aughts, Geneviève “Gen” Taurand loved math and technology. “I became fascinated with all of the new types of cellphones that were coming out,” Taurand said. “It amazed me...
As a civil engineer with the Colorado Department of Transportation, John Kronholm keeps his ear close to ground. Or nature, to be precise. Kronholm is the resident engineer for Eagle and Lake counties, stationed high in the Colorado mountains in...
