We all know how a conventional internal combustion engine works, with a piston and a crankshaft. But that’s by no means the only way to make an engine, and one of the slightly more unusual ...

I was watching air racing superstar Steven Hinton attempt to do what his father had done 38 years before: set the three-kilometer speed record for piston-engine, propeller-driven aircraft.

Ferrari has filed a patent for an engine with pill-shaped pistons, a radical departure from traditional circular piston designs. While Honda famously experimented with oval pistons in the late ...