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250,000 Cubic Meters of Ice in Danger of Breaking Off Europe's Mont Blanc
Highlighting concerns about global warming, Italian authorities now fear that part of the glacier on Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, is at risk of collapse. Experts have been monitoring the Planpicieux glacier on Mont Blanc for some time and concerns have been mounting in Italy that a section of the glacier is at risk of collapsing. Mayors of the picturesque ski towns in the area have been taking civil defense measures, including plans for evacuation on a short notice.
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Can Going Nuclear Combat Climate Change?
To mitigate climate change, the proportion of low-carbon electricity generation must increase from today’s 36 percent to 85 percent by 2040, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says. IEA and other advocates argue that nuclear power could help fill this gap. However, barriers to a nuclear energy renaissance include safety concerns, aging reactors and high costs for new ones.
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Global Climate in 2015-2019 Shows Climate Change Accelerating
The tell-tale signs and impacts of climate change – such as sea level rise, ice loss, and extreme weather – increased during 2015-2019, which is set to be the warmest five-year period on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have also increased to record levels, locking in the warming trend for generations to come.
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Sniffing Out Signs of Trouble
A NIST researcher is conducting the first field test of a high-tech sniffing device called a PLOT-cryo — short for “porous layer open tubular cryogenic adsorption.” This NIST-invented device can be used to detect very low concentrations of chemicals in the air. The technology offers a new way to screen shipping containers at ports of entry.
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Keeping TSA Detection Systems in Check
As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screens nearly two million people each day, officers are faced with the challenge of finding even the smallest sign of a threat. Microscopic particles of explosives can cling to a nefarious actor despite their best intentions to conceal any evidence of hidden contraband on their person or in their bags. S&T chemist Dr. Jim Deline developed a novel method to more efficiently test TSA detection equipment.
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NYC Building a Seawall to Protect City from Rising Seas
On Staten Island, the section of New York City which suffered most of Superstorm Sandy’s devastation, most of the homes destroyed by the storm still sit empty. City engineers have concluded that there was no point fixing and rehabilitating these homes until other measures are taken to protect the Staten Island from the next devastating storms. And climate change will only make these storms more frequent and more intense. These other measures are now underway.
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Global Warming Has “Profound Consequences” for Oceans, Cryosphere
The ocean and the cryosphere – the frozen parts of the planet – play a critical role for life on Earth. A total of 670 million people in high mountain regions and 680 million people in low-lying coastal zones depend directly on these systems. Four million people live permanently in the Arctic region, and small island developing states are home to 65 million people. Global warming has profound consequences for these ecosystems: The ocean is warmer, more acidic and less productive; melting glaciers and ice sheets are causing sea level rise; and coastal extreme events are becoming more severe.
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Science Fiction Has Become Dystopian Fact
So which dystopia are we living in? Most educated people have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. So influential have these books been that we are inclined to view all disconcerting new phenomena as either “Orwellian” or “Huxleyan”. If you suspect we shall lose our freedom to a brutally repressive state, grinding its boot into our faces, you think of George. If you think we shall lose it to a hedonistic consumer culture, complete with test-tube designer babies, you quote Aldous. “My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power,” Huxley wrote in a letter to Orwell in 1949. Niall Ferguson agrees: “As I reflect on the world in 2019, I am struck by the wisdom of [Huxley’s] words. In Xi Jinping’s China, we see Totalitarianism 2.0. The boot on the face remains a possibility, of course, but it is needed less and less as the system of social credit expands, aggregating and analyzing all the digital data that Chinese citizens generate.”
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Global Temperatures Rising More Quickly, Warns UN
Sea-level rise, ice loss, extreme weather and other effects of climate change are increasing, according to the United Nations’ weather agency. The period from 2015 to the end of 2019 is likely to be the warmest five-year period on record globally, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said. Last year there was the largest number of tropical cyclones of any year since 2000 and large parts of Africa, central America, Brazil, the Caribbean and Australia have experienced more frequent droughts since 2015.
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Humans “Extinct by 2100” as Intelligent Life Annihilates Itself Says Oxford Prof
There is almost a one-in-five chance that humans will be wiped out before this century is over, according to an Oxford University department. The overall probability — or “existential risk” — of human extinction by 2100 is worryingly high, at 19 percent, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute has calculated. Nick Bostrom, director of the Institute, notes that we should worry about the fact that aliens have not yet visited planet Earth: With billions of stars in our galaxy, it is proposed that statistically there is a very high chance of an alien race existing which has mastered space travel. But we have never found any evidence for interstellar tourists. This intriguing contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox. Bostrom says that the fact that we have so far failed to discover another intelligent existence in space may mean that other intelligent races on other planets, if they had ever existed, may have doomed themselves to extinction by their own advanced technologies.
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Making the Internet Faster, More Secure
A collaborative effort aims to create a nationwide research infrastructure that will enable the computer science and networking community to develop and test novel architectures that could yield a faster, more secure internet. Dubbed “FABRIC,” the four-year, $20 million project is intended to support exploratory research, at scale, in computer networking, distributed computing systems, and next-generation applications.
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California Wildfires Can Impact Water Availability
In recent years, wildfires in the western United States have occurred with increasing frequency and scale. Climate change scenarios in California predict prolonged periods of drought with potential for conditions even more amenable to wildfires. The Sierra Nevada Mountains provide up to 70 percent of the state’s water resources, yet there is little known on how wildfires will impact water resources in the future.
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R&D, not Greenland, Can Solve Our Rare Earth Problem
While President Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland lit up social media feeds and left many scratching their heads, people who work on rare earth elements were not surprised. Greenland has rare earth elements, and currently most are mined in China. Julie Michelle Klinger and Roger Turner write that instead of periodically reviving rare earth scarcity myths to stoke anti-China sentiment or justify outlandish ideas like buying Greenland or pulverizing the moon, we can invest in several areas where people are already working. “Opening more mines like it’s 1590, buying territories like it’s 1867, or blasting asteroids like we’re in a 1950s sci-fi flick won’t solve the problem, because the problem is not a shortage of unrefined ores. Instead, smart R&D investments will bring our production, consumption and disposal practices into the 21st century. This means reducing waste, increasing recycling and repair, and cleaning up the dirtiest and most dangerous aspects of the supply chain.”
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Determining the Who, Why, and How Behind Manipulated Media
The threat of manipulated multi-modal media – which includes audio, images, video, and text – is increasing as automated manipulation technologies become more accessible, and social media continues to provide a ripe environment for viral content sharing. The creators of convincing media manipulations are no longer limited to groups with significant resources and expertise. Today, an individual content creator has access to capabilities that could enable the development of an altered media asset that creates a believable, but falsified, interaction or scene. A new program seeks to develop technologies capable of automating the detection, attribution, and characterization of falsified media assets.
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Constitution Day 2019: The Hidden Domestic Surveillance Crisis
As we mark the 232nd anniversary of the signing of America’s governing charter in 1787, we have ample evidence that it continues to be violated by the federal officials charged with upholding it. The FBI’s 2018-2020 “Consolidated Strategy Guide,” for example, not only references the targeting of so-called “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE’s) but also those designated as engaged in “Anti-Government/Anti-Authority Extremism,” “Abortion Extremism,” or “Animal Rights/Environmental Extremism.” “That the FBI is using an ideological test of its own devising to determine whether a person seeking products or services on ‘the Dark Web’ is a threat raises a host of potential constitutional issues, including whether the monitoring of a person’s online activities based on their ideology runs afoul of the First Amendment or the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision,” Patrick Eddington writes, adding: “If we are on the cusp of a de facto COINTELPRO 2.0, the infamous Cold War-era FBI program of domestic spying and organizational disruption, we need to end it. Now.”
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More headlines
The long view
Autonomous Vehicle Technology Vulnerable to Road Object Spoofing and Vanishing Attacks
Researchers have demonstrated the potentially hazardous vulnerabilities associated with the technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, many autonomous vehicles use to navigate streets, roads and highways. The researchers have shown how to use lasers to fool LiDAR into “seeing” objects that are not present and missing those that are – deficiencies that can cause unwarranted and unsafe braking or collisions.
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.
Prototype Self-Service Screening System Unveiled
TSA and DHS S&T unveiled a prototype checkpoint technology, the self-service screening system, at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas, NV. The aim is to provide a near self-sufficient passenger screening process while enabling passengers to directly receive on-person alarm information and allow for the passenger self-resolution of those alarms.
Falling Space Debris: How High Is the Risk I'll Get Hit?
An International Space Station battery fell back to Earth and, luckily, splashed down harmlessly in the Atlantic. Should we have worried? Space debris reenters our atmosphere every week.
Testing Cutting-Edge Counter-Drone Technology
Drones have many positive applications, bad actors can use them for nefarious purposes. Two recent field demonstrations brought government, academia, and industry together to evaluate innovative counter-unmanned aircraft systems.
Strengthening the Grid’s ‘Backbone’ with Hydropower
Argonne-led studies investigate how hydropower could help add more clean energy to the grid, how it generates value as grids add more renewable energy, and how liner technology can improve hydropower efficiency.