Energy & Green Tech

Chile's lithium dreams raise water concerns in the desert

As night falls in Chile's Atacama desert, the world's driest, a drilling machine extracts brine to measure levels of lithium—a crucial mineral for the global switch to cleaner energy, but harmful in its own way.

Engineering

Father, son bond over engineering a record-smashing roadster

Sandia National Laboratories manager Joel Wirth, a mechanical engineer by training, studied a problem with his car. The weight was too far back, making the car fishtail whenever he drove it faster than 200 mph.