Winter 2006

Volume 21, Issue 3

FEATURES

The Salton Sea was created a century ago by disastrous civil engineering. Now people are trying to figure out how to save it.

The supersonic transport was both inevitable and beneficial—until it turned out to be neither

How the greatest special-effects movie was made with the simplest technology

Dental floss is a great underappreciated invention

A lone inventor and a lone crusader gave the world a safe device to hold railroad cars together