People have been trying to predict earthquakes for centuries—using animal behavior, weather, and seismic monitoring—but have had less than stellar success. As the human population shifts from a mostly rural existence to a mostly urban one, earthquakes exact a higher price, both in property damage and in lives lost.

In April 2007, a gasoline tanker crashed and burned while negotiating the MacArthur Maze, a network of interstate connections around the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge in California. The resulting blaze was so intense that it caused parts of the I-580 overpass to crash onto the interstate below.

If you haven't spent much time around agricultural equipment, you may not know that modern tractors are very large, very powerful, and increasingly sophisticated to handle the rough terrain and other conditions they deal with every day.

One of the worst parts of being stuck in traffic (besides the frustration and the need to watch the cars around you lest one of them do something stupid and dangerous) is the smell. The fumes you can smell are bad enough, but the real nasties are, too often, chemicals that have no scent at all, such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and a slew of volatile organic compounds.

Electric trains draw power from overhead lines, using a device called a pantograph to maintain connection between the train and the load-carrying wire overhead (known as overhead track equipment (OHTE)).

If you've ever worked while resting a laptop computer on your lap, you know that computers emit heat, and the more powerful the computer, the greater the heat produced. This is a problem because electronics really don't enjoy elevated temperatures. A hot computer is a slow computer or, worse, a computer that will cease functioning.

Installations such as refineries, chemical plants, and other such beasts are peculiarly blessed with intricate networks of pipes, pressure vessels, or other structures that can suffer from corrosion. Normally, unplanned outages are avoided by dispatching personnel to visit the sites and take readings on the relative health of the parts in question.

While GPS can tell ocean-going vessels where they are, the ships rely on propeller speed to figure out how fast they're going. For vessels with fixed propellers, the best way to determine this is to measure the speed of the propeller shaft, which is coupled to the engine.

When garbage in landfills decays, it produces methane. This is handy if you're interested in tapping it and using it to generate electricity, but it's not so great if it builds up in the areas where people work.

Accurate data on the behavior of storm surges could lead to more intelligent zoning, infrastructure, and land management programs. According to Ben McGee, a supervisory hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), "storm surge data had always been generated after the storm. We'd basically go into a storm-impacted area . . . and look for high-water marks." Hurricane Katrina got members of the USGS's Ruston, LA, office thinking about how helpful it would be to track surge levels during the storm. Then came Rita, which gave them that chance.