Georgia Tech’s Geosystems group has released high‑resolution digital scans of Prof George F. Sowers’ handwritten Harvard course notes from the late 1940s, capturing original lectures by Karl Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande on topics such as effective stress, consolidation and stability analysis. The archive, drawn from Sowers’ time as a graduate student, preserves worked examples, early design charts and problem sets that pre‑date many modern textbooks. Practitioners gain direct access to primary teaching material from the formative period of modern soil mechanics for reference, teaching and historical comparison.

New British Geological Survey mapping of the upper 2m of seabed across the UK North Sea shows highly variable near-surface geology, challenging assumptions of relatively uniform sands used in many cable burial designs. The work identifies rapid lateral changes between sands, gravels, soft sediments and lag deposits at scales relevant to ploughs and jetting tools, with implications for trench stability, target burial depths and pull-out resistance for subsea power and telecoms cables. Designers may need denser geophysical and geotechnical sampling and more adaptable burial equipment specifications.

Helical piles and anchors are presented as displacement deep foundations whose performance depends on correctly specifying helix geometry (diameter, pitch, spacing), shaft type (solid square vs hollow round), and corrosion protection for the design life. The guide stresses matching installation torque to required axial capacity, using torque correlation factors (Kt) appropriate to soil type, and defining minimum embedment depth and number of helices rather than leaving these to contractors. Engineers are urged to state load cases (tension, compression, lateral), serviceability criteria, and testing requirements such as proof and pre-production load tests.