Introduction Have you ever ridden a roller coaster? Have you ever wanted to design your own? There are plenty of expensive toys and even video games that will let you build your own coasters—but in ...

One of the first “roller-coaster” rides in the U.S. was actually a short coal railway in Pennsylvania that hauled coal downhill between mines and used mules to bring the empty cars back up the hill.

Roller coasters rely on two types of energy to operate: gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy. Gravitational potential energy is the energy an object has stored because of its mass and its ...