The car runs, so there is that.

But as the Cal Super Mileage Vehicle Team loaded its ultralight carbon-fiber three-wheeler into a trailer for the long haul from Berkeley to Houston, Murphy was definitely in the driver's seat. Anything that could go wrong did — and did so in the last 12 hours before the team was to leave for the Shell Eco-marathon.

The Eco-marathon is a race, of sorts. The only goal is doing 10 laps around a Houston park at an average speed of 15 mph while consuming the teeniest, tiniest amount of energy possible.

Last year's winners, from Laval University in Quebec, achieved a...

1726: Isaac Newton tells a biographer the story of how an apple falling in his garden prompted him to develop his law of universal gravitation. It will become an enduring origin story in the annals of science, and it may even be true.

Newton was apparently fond of telling the tale, but written sources do not reveal a specific date for the fabled fruit-fall. We do know that on this day in 1726, William Stukeley talked with Newton in the London borough of Kensington, and Newton told him how, many years before, the idea had occurred to him.

As recounted in Stukeley’s Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s L...