National History Day 2014: Physics, Engineering, and Technology Topics

The 2014 National History Day theme is "Rights and Responsibilities in History!"

This is the second in a series of posts with ideas for NHD project topics. The first post, about biology and chemistry topics, is here (it's been updated recently!). This post will focus on topics in physics, engineering, and technology. "Rights and Responsibilities" is a theme that lends itself particularly well to issues of technology and privacy, as well as to ethics more generally. Some of these may be a bit too recent to make good NHD topics, and all of these topics should be interpreted with respect to the theme. Some of them may be strong in one of rights and responsibilities and strong in the other, but projects should try to incorporate both.

The list of topics is below the fold! Note that this may be updated from time to time.
Note: If you're looking for 2014-2015 ideas (Leadership and Legacy), go here!

Technology
Internet and privacy
Social media and privacy
Hacking
Government wire tapping
GPS tracking
Cameras with built-in GPS and privacy
Security cameras (lots of ways to interpret this!)
RFID in passports, credit cards, etc
3D printing (especially interesting in light of the recent issues with 3D printing of guns)
Internet and piracy (downloading, file-sharing, either individual or organized group)
Internet censorship
Software patenting
Other digital rights or digital divide issues
Industrial Revolution and labor laws (would need to choose something more specific here; some variant on this will probably be a pretty common topic)
Non-proliferation treaty (arms control and disarmament)
Biometric analysis and privacy
Technology, manufacturing, and third world employment
Suggestion from NHD theme description: choose a technology (examples were printing press or television) and examine how it's changed how people think about rights and responsibilities

Engineering
Alternative energy (need to choose something more specific here)
Nuclear energy, perhaps in light of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island
Disposal/storage of nuclear waste
Creation of the atomic bomb, Manhattan Project, etc.
Structural failures at the turn of the 20th century and effect on engineering ethics (Ashtabula River Railroad, Tay Bridge, Quebec Bridge)
Those failures, as well as the Boston molasses flood, and engineering licensure
Choose a failure with ethical elements. Wikipedia has a good list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_ethics
Car manufacturing and safety features, Unsafe at Any Speed

Physics
Radium Girls and occupational disease
Galileo and the Catholic Church (likely to be common)
Fears about safety of the Large Hadron Collider before it was started

Other
Earthquake prediction (especially L'Aquila, but possibly too soon to do this) 
Scientific misconduct, maybe responsibility of peer reviewers? (could focus on Schon scandal)