Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking

On April 27, 1865, just weeks after the end of the American Civil War, the steamship Sultana exploded and sank in the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee. It remains the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history, with estimates ranging from 1,500 to over 1,800 dead. The explosion of the steamship Sultana was not an isolated…

The Power Transmission Distributors Association (PTDA) held its Industry Summit Oct. 23–25 at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort and Spa. The event, themed “Spurring Connections,” brought together nearly 450 distributors and manufacturers from the power transmission and motion control industry to exchange information and discuss industry priorities. Over three days, attendees engaged…

One of the things I always do toward the beginning of the engineering ethics classes I teach, when we are just being introduced to the subject, is to pose the following question. I say here we are, together in this classroom inside of this building on campus. Look around you; can you point to something…

By Mark Jones The Royal Society’s motto, ‘Nullius in verba,’ translates literally to ‘no one’s words.’ It is taken to mean ‘take nobody’s word for it,” interpreted as verify all statements by experiment. The Society has published many impactful scientific advances over the course of its near 400-year history. It is some serious stuff. Newton’s…

In addition to Design World’s new Ethical Engineering column, we’re also debuting another column focused on engineering disasters or failures. Why disasters and why now? The short (perhaps simplistic) answer is that engineering failures are a part of the engineering process, and so in a sense they are bound to happen. And when they do,…

In the business landscape we’re navigating today, few components impact the bottom line quite like supply chain management. Perhaps more importantly, few elements of a business affect the overall experience for human end-users like a supply chain operating at maximum efficiency. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence are revolutionizing how factories strategize, how goods move,…

By Mark Jones The knife drawer in the borrowed vacation house didn’t contain knives. It contained knife-shaped hunks of dull steel. The only explanation for the overflowing drawer was that the owner didn’t understand that knives could be sharpened. I didn’t have my knife-sharpening paraphernalia with me — I was, after all, on vacation. Fortunately,…

I wasn’t looking to be inspired when I called for an Uber to the airport. I was flying to an industry conference and simply wanted safe transportation — and the opportunity to unwind from an already busy morning at work. But the ride proved eye-opening and put some things in needed perspective. As I waited…

By Mark Jones Technology has come a long way since 1974, but some products introduced that year have had lasting impacts. Consumer pagers were introduced by Motorola, starting the march to the cellphones of today. The Intel 8080 and the Altair 8800 both came that year. Both figure prominently in the history of computing. And…

By Mark Jones I’ve long been fascinated by the observations underlying the inspiration, the eureka moments leading to invention. But inspiration from a urinating dog came as a surprise. A recent study on designing a splashless urinal made — and excuse the pun — a bit of a splash. Headlines such as “Physicists make a…

By Mark Jones Mining ended almost 2,000 years ago at Rennes. The abandoned quarry created by the Roman miners provided an easy place to dispose of unwanted stuff. Archaeologists are giddy about what they are finding in what became an ancient dump near the French city of Rennes. Discarded items found at the Rennes quarry…

By Mark Jones Each month, I email this column to the editor of Design World. It is the way we communicate and the way I communicate with many others. So, an article quantifying the human mortality cost of email signatures caught my attention. I dug in, curious to find how email leads to death. The…

The phrase, “E pur si muove,” (or in English “and yet it moves”) is attributed to the Italian natural scientist Galileo Galilei, who allegedly uttered it sometime after being brought before the Inquisition and forced to recant his claim that the earth moved around the sun and not the other way around, as was the…

By Mark Jones I got skunked. Two groups published an idea I had before I could complete the research. But let’s go back to the beginning. Ever the supportive spouse, I accompanied my wife for her colonoscopy in early May. But I had an ulterior motive; I wanted a sample from the IV bag. A…

By Mark Jones I was in Florida when the alert came telling me my house was in danger of catching fire due to an electrical problem. Not news I wanted to receive while 1,400 miles away from home. An internet-connected device plugged into an outlet detected a problem. Whisker Labs was reaching out to warn…

Whether you’ve had a subscription to The Economist since college or know nothing about the taxing of imported goods, you’ve probably been thinking a lot more about tariffs than usual. The subject has overtaken the airwaves and the watercooler alike since mid-January, and when it will subside is anybody’s guess. The Trump Administration’s “on-again, off-again”…

By Mark Jones The experiment is brilliant. Researchers came up with a way to compare the intelligence of ants to humans. It didn’t go so well for us. Some of us perform worse at a cognitive test than an ant. Disturbing as that is, the study also shows that when we cooperate in a group,…

By Mark Jones 2024 was the year of spatulageddon. Plastic spatulas were trashed due to reports of dangers lurking within. The journal article that raised concern contained an error, an obvious error. A correction was made, but there’s more to the story. The study causing spatulageddon was published in the journal Chemosphere. The corresponding author…

By Mark Jones I was bored as I waited for my “torch” — something that this food truck called its sandwiches — and so random thoughts came and went. This torch name seemed to be an unnecessary gimmick. Fumes directed my next thoughts: fumes from portable generators. Each food truck in the line of food…

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately (and even if you don’t pay that much attention at all), you’ve probably noticed that there sure seem to be a lot of stories about food recalls and alerts in the United States. I’ve certainly noticed. Every day that I visit a major news website, there…

By Mark Jones As I passed the horse and buggy, I noticed a buggy whip in the driver’s hand. While buggy whips are the standard analogy for obsolete technology, here I was confronted with one currently in use. Any technology doomed to be replaced will, at some point, be compared with buggy whips. Yet, buggy…

By Mark Jones I’m sure detailed questions about fuel consumption from a passenger aren’t common, but the pilots on flights 2030 and 1114 humored me. My ticket showed the emissions allotted to my seat, something I noticed for the first time. The numbers were lower than I anticipated, so I wanted to check the math.…

I’ve lived in my home for 20 years now, and a lot accumulated and cluttered the living space over that time. So much so that it periodically requires a full purge of possessions. When that happens, the industrial-strength dumpster rolls onto the driveway, and I start cleaning house. Once done, it’s like a weight has…

By Mark Jones Mistakes happen. But small mistakes create big impacts when perpetrated by enormous companies. The largest IT meltdown ever occurred because a small mistake took down 8.5 million computers. Scale made it a big problem, just like a recent ice cream issue. The pictures of airport concourses with bright blue screens on kiosks…

It’s the holidays again, and with all the commotion and stressors of the season, few things go out the window faster for me than moderation: the food, the presents, the social engagements — it’s festivities: full-throttle. Admittedly, I can be a bit much. So, it should be no surprise that it is with that same…