Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. This was a mantra I picked up on the playground at elementary school--something I repeated over and over again anytime I came face to face with racism. It was a coping mechanism meant to guard my heart from the cacophony of discriminatory comments that shaped me as a young Korean American girl growing up in predominantly white spaces. But now that I'm well into adulthood, I think about the girls of color who are also being taught to pretend that words don't hurt--and the people this way of thinking actually protects. It's hard to escape the unrelenting consequences of racism: In the past year alone, we lost Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and the six women of Asian descent murdered in Atlanta (Xiaojie "Emily" Tan, Daoyou Feng, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant) at the hands of this insidious disease--and those are just the names that were in the headlines. If we don't acknowledge ...

A natural gas fired turbine, manufactured by Caterpillar Inc. subsidiary Solar Turbines Inc., runs a compressor at a Williston Basin Interstate Pipeline Co., a subsidiary of MDU Resources Group Inc., natural gas compression station in Bismarck, North Dakota. In the world of oil and natural gas, engineers, geologists, and drilling and production departments tend to get the lion's share of the credit when good things happen, and most of the blame when they don't. That's fair, given the crucial roles these groups of employees play within the thousands of companies that make up the U.S. oil and gas industry. But in recent years, as overall domestic production has risen at a pace no one could have foreseen even five years ago, the credit has begun to shift. These human resources remain indispensable to the success of any company, but the deployment of a raft of advancing technologies has played an ever-advancing role over time in enabling companies to maximize recoveries and profits.

BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA – U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao on Wednesday announced 10 sites for a test program aimed at increasing the use of unmanned aircraft for projects that range from monitoring crops and oil pipelines in North Dakota to applying mosquito-killing treatments in Florida and package deliveries in Tennessee. President Donald Trump signed a directive last year to establish the "innovation zones" that allow exemptions to some drone regulations, such as flying over people, nighttime flights and flights where the aircraft can't be seen by the operator. States, communities and tribes selected to participate would devise their own trial programs in partnership with government and industry drone users. "Data gathered from these pilot projects will form the basis of a new regulatory framework to safely integrate drones into our national airspace," Chao said in a statement. Chao, who called the rapidly developing drone industry the biggest development since the jet age, said about 150 applications were received.

The individuals who attended the Central North American Trade Corridor Association's second biennial Trade, Transportation and Technology Conference at the Southeast College's Estevan campus on April 26 heard of some interesting developments, including the evolution of autonomous vehicles. David Blair, the CEO of Network Solutions and Services in Bismarck, N.D., and Justin Glasser, the manager of Tubular Transport and Logistics, discussed the impact that autonomous vehicle technologies will have on businesses, including those on the energy sector. They also discussed electric vehicles, and how those will impact the power generation industry. "GM is projected to have 500,000 new electric cars in another year, so that's going to impact the power grid, and how we are going to handle that," Blair said. He predicted electronic cars could carry some good news for Saskatchewan and North Dakota, because both areas produce a lot of electricity through coal.

City officials in Bismarck are considering adding a driverless bus to the Capital Area Transit fleet as part of a pilot program testing the use of autonomous vehicle technology on city streets.