The South African National Defence Force "is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise.
Deadly germs may be more likely to be spread due to a biodefence lab accident than a biological attack by terrorists.
The UK government has initiated a research program aimed at finding ways to avert catastrophic software failures in critical IT networks like healthcare or banking systems.
Although it has been recently plagued with technical failures and mismanagment, experts argue NASA could be revitalized with a combination of bold leadership and visionary goals.
The author argues that the western world's reliance on a "weak and dilapidated energy and communications network infrastructures" is a recipe for disaster.
The author argues that policymakers should take another look at the disastarous swine flu vaccinations of the 1970s for help in the current debate over smallpox vaccinations.
Bruce Schneier, a top security expert, says America's approach to protecting itself from terrorism will only make matters worse. Forget "foolproof" technology?we need systems designed to fail smartly.
George Johnson argues that humanity's reliance on machine intelligence is doomed to cause fatal accidents, like the recent collision of two airliners, because the machines are as fallible as humans are.
The author lists ten famous and not so famous technological disasters to illustrate the point that "trusted technologies can suddenly go wrong, and how flaws that seem trivial or, in retrospect, painfully obvious can have devastating consequences."
Serious reliability problems in systems subject to sudden criticality can be caused by boredom, drinking or drug taking, habit and routine, isolation, and sustained high levels of stress. Nuclear military forces require that groups of people act together, but transferring capability and responsibility from individuals to groups does not by itself protect against the limits of safety imposed by human error, illness, or malevolence. While practical steps can minimize the risks of human fallibility, there is no way to completely eliminate the potential for catastrophe in nuclear military systems except by completely eliminating nuclear weapons.