Wired.com looks at ‘what the media are calling “the world’s most expensive car accident” and the cops are calling “a gathering of narcissists.”’.

The massive mess destroyed about $3.85 million worth of lustworthy cars and a Toyota Prius late Sunday morning on rain-soaked Chugoku Expressway. The supercars were part of a 20-car convoy heading from Kyushu to Hiroshima when the lead driver, a 60-year-old businessman in a Ferrari F430 Scuderia, lost control on the wet pavement.

“The accident occurred when the driver of a red Ferrari was switching from the right lane to the left and skidded,” Mitsuyoshi Isejima, of the Yamaguchi Prefecture Expressway Traffic Police unit, told Bloomberg. “It was a gathering of narcissists.”

The convoy speeding through the western prefecture of Yamaguchi included an assortment of Ferraris, a LamborghiniDiablo, a Nissan GT-R and a Mercedes-Benz CL 600. These weren’t kids, either. Police said the drivers were all between 37 and 60, and you know they had money — even a used Ferrari runs six figures in Japan, and no more than 500 Ferraris were sold in the country last year.

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Brian T. Weaver, P.E. and Steve A. Rundell, Ph.D., P.E., featured in a Gannett news article regarding the new Detroit Office.

This engineering application known as “injury causation analysis” can be explained in simple terms, said Weaver: “In order to understand the injury, you have to understand the event.”

Yet there’s no denying the complexity of what they do, what they know and what they need to find out. Studying automobile collisions calls for analyzing evidence of speed and other factors to match them with the severity of an impact, for example. Or perhaps a case requires investigating how a bone broke in an accident or the effects of a faulty spinal implant, tapping into a solid knowledge of biomechanics — which applies mechanical engineering principles to biological systems. It’s about keen intuition, an eye for detail and the ability to communicate findings clearly.

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Gizmodo, of all blogs, reports on the expanded use of 3D laser scanners by police in the UK.

In the UK as in the US, a car wreck involving injuries or fatalities must be painstakingly recorded and preserved for insurance and court proceedings. Police investigators might block off the roadway for several hours as they take pictures of the scene and record measurements to log what happened. In the US, accident reconstruction is also big business, with experts retained by lawyers to discuss speeds, trajectories and impact physics.

The laser scanner will capture a 360-degree image of a crash scene, the BBC reports. Mounted on a tripod, a laser scans the horizon and records up to 30 million separate data points, down to sub-millimeter resolution. Each sweep takes four minutes, and investigators will typically make four sweeps, the BBC says. The image can then be processed into a 3-D computer model, allowing investigators to see where the vehicles are located relative to each other, tire skid marks, and other evidence.

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The New York Times discusses those announcements to turn off your electronic devices:

Passengers are taking an increasing array of devices on board planes — cellphones, tablets, GPS units and more. Many of these devices transmit a signal, and all of them emit electromagnetic waves, which, in theory, could interfere with the plane’s electronics. At the same time, older planes might not have the best shielding against the latest generation of devices, some engineers said.

“Is it worrisome?” asked Bill Strauss, an engineer who studied passenger use of electronic devices several years ago. “It is.”

Safety experts suspect that electronic interference has played a role in some accidents, though that is difficult to prove. One crash in which cellphone interference with airplane navigation was cited as a possible factor involved a charter in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2003. Eight people died when the plane flew into the ground short of the runway.

The pilot had called home, and the call remained connected for the last three minutes of the flight. In the final report, the New Zealand Transport Accident Investigation Commission stated, “The pilot’s own cellphone might have caused erroneous indications” on a navigational aid.

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BC Business Online looks at two British Columbia accident reconstruction firms:

A new DNA spray may be the future of matching criminals to the scene of a crime:

When the McDonald’s down from City Hall here was burglarized a few years ago, its managers decided they needed a new security system.

It was just about that time that local police officers were offering something totally different that they hoped would stem a rising tide of robberies that occur mainly in the immigrant neighborhoods of this rough-and-tumble port city. The new system involved an employee-activated device that sprays a fine, barely visible mist laced with synthetic DNA to cover anyone in its path, including criminals, and simultaneously alerts the police to a crime in progress.

The mist — visible only under ultraviolet light — carries DNA markers particular to the location, enabling the police to match the burglar with the place burgled. Now, a sign on the front door of the McDonald’s prominently warns potential thieves of the spray’s presence: “You Steal, You’re Marked.”

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New York designer Tina Roth Eisenberg profiles photographer Arnold Odermatt:

Swiss police officer and photographer Arnold Odermatt became famous in his retirement on the publication of Karambolage, his photographic journal about the traffic accidents that were part of his professional life in the Swiss canton of Nidwalden.

Arriving at the scene of an accident, Odermatt would take one set of photographs for the insurance or police reports, and then take another for himself. His reasons for doing so are mysterious, but the results are often strangely beautiful.

Some exciting developments in the field of three-dimensional renderings from the New York Times:

Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities.

The new system, PhotoCity, grew from the original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, who while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington, developed a set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos.

The one year anniversary of Flight 1549 reminds us of the remarkable landing with both a Sully book tour and a survivor reunion at the crash site. Not much has been written about the actually NTSB accident investigation–it seems damage from the birds was confirmed in both engines:

Federal safety officials said today they’ve confirmed there were birds in both engines of the US Airways plane that ditched into New York’s Hudson River last month. The National Transportation Safety Board said remains from both engines have also been sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to have the bird species identified.

And what about those bird species? Turns out they were geese:

The identification was made by the bird lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, by microscopic analysis of feathers found inside the engines and DNA tests on bird tissue also found there. The engines are being taken apart at an engine factory in Cincinnati.

Exosphere3D, a Denver based animation firm, created this accident reconstruction of US Airways Flight 1549. From the Exosphere3D website:

This animation is based on all currently available data concerning the US Airways Flight 1549 crash (Cactus 1549). Satellite imagery, elevation models and robust GIS mapping methods are utilized to create a vegetation model, terrain model and ground clutter (3D buildings). Of all available audio tracks, only two are used, La Guardia Tower and New York TRACON Departure controller position. Radar data as well as the onboard Flight Data Recorder are utilized in constructing the flightpath of the aircraft.

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The deadly accident was one of thousands in highway work zones across the country that have killed at least 4,700 people — more than two a day — and injured 200,000 in the last five years alone. Ubiquitous annoyances of on-the-go American life, work zones are sometimes death traps, too.

Behind this human toll is a litany of mundane hazards: concrete barriers in the wrong position, obsolete lane markings left in place, warning signs never deployed.

Yet there are virtually no laws or regulations mandating safety measures in work zones. There are standards, but they are loosely enforced and differ from state to state. As a result, there are few penalties levied against contractors when, because of ignorance, carelessness or a desire to save money, guidelines are violated. Problem contractors often just keep on getting hired, and dangerous practices remain uncorrected, sometimes for years.

The article also included graphics recreating some highway work zone accidents: