To keep up with demand, the oil industry ventures increasingly farther and deeper offshore, extracting resources as fast as possible in often hazardous conditions with newly minted technology. So to these panelists, the BP Deepwater Horizon accident did not come as a complete surprise. However, they view the disaster from distinctly different perspectives. “The same things happen all the time” in major accidents, states Nancy Leveson. There are flaws in the “safety culture” of the industry, including a sense that its enterprise is inherently “more risky” and accidents inevitable --“the price of production.” Leveson notes that “being 35 thousand feet in the air in a metal cylinder is not a safe thing, but the commercial aerospace industry has made it safe.” Industry leaders don’t believe that safety pays and consequently they merely comply with regulations. Rather than seeking systemic fixes, they blame operator error or technical failure. Nevertheless, says Leveson, “Complex systems migrate toward states of high risk, so the oil industry should “must change its culture” and implement safeguards. “We can’t make things perfectly safe but we can make them a lot safer than they are.” Cement, used for thousands of years in construction, is only now revealing its secrets to scientists. Roland Pelenq is interested in how cement responds chemically, and at the atomic scale, to extremes in pressure and temperature, such as those found in the depths of offshore drilling sites. He speculates that mistakes in cement formulation might lead to calamitous structural flaws. A specific cement chemistry (calcium and silica primarily) determines the setting process. Ordinary cement grows from liquid to solid in 10 hours, as nano-sized bricks line up in layers. Oil well cement must be mixed with a different ratio of calcium and silica, or it won’t cohere correctly when deep under water. Pelenq says, “If I’m a cement guy working for the oil industry, I want setting as fast as possib...