• China Will Dominate High-Tech Unless the United States Takes Off the Gloves

    The U.S.-China trade war has affected businesses from Apple to American cherry growers and shows no signs of halting, but the profuse debate around Huawei and the Trump administration’s trade war reveals a fundamental weakness in the American economy: its lack of competitiveness. The United States should continue to defend against potential security threats posed by Chinese firms, but it should not rely on these protections only as a strategy to maintain competitiveness. The erosion of U.S. dominance in other key high-tech, high-value sectors – automobiles, consumer electronics, robotics, AI, energy, biotechnology, electric vehicles —suggest that there are more fundamental problems. “If the United States wishes to maintain its high-tech leadership, it must be willing to invest in the industries critical to success in the twenty-first century,” three experts write.

  • Retreating from Rising Seas Isn’t a Win or a Defeat — It’s Reality

    “Managed retreat” is a controversial response to climate change. It’s the idea that communities and governments should be strategic about moving people away from areas that have become too waterlogged to live in safely. Retreating from coastlines and riversides might have once been considered unthinkable. But across the world, it’s already happening — in Australia, Colombia, Vietnam, and here in the United States. And Indonesia just found itself a new capital. The country’s president, Joko Widodo, announced on Monday that the new seat of government will be on the island of Borneo, hundreds of miles to the northeast of the current capital, Jakarta. The Java Sea threatens to swallow 95 percent of the city over the next 30 years.

  • Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill

    A Marine Corps program called Sea Mob aims to develop cutting-edge technology which would allow vessels to undertake lethal assaults without a direct human hand at the helm. A handful of such systems have been deployed for decades, though only in limited, defensive roles, such as shooting down missiles hurtling toward ships. But with the development of AI-infused systems, the military is now on the verge of fielding machines capable of going on the offensive, picking out targets and taking lethal action without direct human input.

  • DHS Seeks Standards for “Smart City” Sensors, Starting in St. Louis

    The Homeland Security Department’s Science and Technology Directorate is kicking off a pilot program that will test the integration of smart city technologies in St. Louis, Missouri. Working in collaboration with the city and the Open Geospatial Consortium, agency insiders will use the pilot to research, design and assess Homeland Security’s Smart City Interoperability Reference Architecture, or SCIRA.

  • China May Have Used a Recent Massive iPhone Hack to Target Uighur Muslims

    A recent massive iPhone hack discovered by Google researchers may have been a campaign to target Uighur Muslims, an oppressed ethnic minority living in China, TechCrunch and Forbes report. The hack came to light last week, when researchers at Google’s cybersecurity wing Project Zero reported they had found a handful of websites which had been secretly injecting spyware into iPhones over the course of two years.

  • Helping Nuclear Forensics Investigations by Going Small

    Until recently, the analysis and identification of nuclear fuel pellets in nuclear forensics investigations have been mainly focused on macroscopic characteristics, such as fuel pellet dimensions, uranium enrichment and other reactor-specific features. But scientists are going a step further by going down to the microscale to study the diverse characteristics of nuclear fuel pellets that could improve nuclear forensic analysis by determining more effectively where the material came from and how it was made.

  • Better Support Column Design to Help Bridges to Withstand Earthquakes

    Bridges make travel faster and more convenient, but, in an earthquake, these structures are subject to forces that can cause extensive damage and make them unsafe. Researchers are investigating the performance of hybrid sliding-rocking (HSR) columns. HSR columns provide the same support as conventional bridge infrastructure columns but are more earthquake-resistant.

  • Helping Structures Better Withstand Earthquakes, Wind, and Fire

    NIST is awarding more than $6.6 million to fund research into improving disaster resilience. Eleven organizations will receive 12 grants to conduct research into how earthquakes, wind and fire affect the built environment to inform building designs, codes and standards to help those structures better withstand such hazards.

  • Examining a Video’s Changes Over Time Helps Flag Deepfakes

    It used to be that only Hollywood production companies with deep pockets and teams of skilled artists and technicians could make deepfake videos, realistic fabrications appearing to show people doing and saying things they never actually did or said. Not anymore – software freely available online lets anyone with a computer and some time on their hands create convincing fake videos. Whether used for personal revenge, to harass celebrities or to influence public opinion, deepfakes render untrue the age-old axiom that “seeing is believing.”

  • A College Reading List for the Post-Truth Era

    “We live in a time beset with belittlement of science, hostility toward expertise and attacks on traditional democratic institutions,” Michael T. Nietzel, president emeritus of Missouri State University, writes. “It’s a post-truth period where conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas flourish. If the facts conflict with someone’s sense of identity or political ideology, then the facts are disposable. They can be replaced with notions that feel better or reverberate on social media.” What is the best way to achieve the goal of making young students less susceptible to dangerous s stupidities and toxic conspiracy theories? Nietzel has a suggestion — although he admits it is increasingly rare as an academic expectation: serious reading. He offers seven recent books which champion reason over emotion, distinguish facts from fallacies, and enumerate the dangers of ignoring the truth.

  • Device Vanishes on Command after Military Missions

    A polymer that self-destructs? While once a fictional idea, new polymers now exist that are rugged enough to ferry packages or sensors into hostile territory and vaporize immediately upon a military mission’s completion. This “James Bond”-like material is already being incorporated in military devices, but there is a potential for the materials in non-military applications.

  • U.S. School Spends $48 Million on Curved Corridors and Hiding Places to Foil Mass Shooters

    A school in the United States has spent $48 million redesigning its buildings with curved corridors, hiding places, and cement barriers in a bid to thwart mass shooters. The project at Fruitport High School in Michigan is aimed at reducing casualties in the event of an attack by hampering the sight lines available to a gunman in corridors. Cement barriers are being installed in hallways for pupils and teachers to take cover. Classroom windows looking on to hallways are being covered with impact-resistant film. Each classroom will also have a corner, called a “shadow zone,” that is not visible from the hallway.

  • The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs

    When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election last year, having run on a platform of deforestation, David Wallace-Wells, writing in New York Magazine, asked, “How much damage can one person do to the planet?” Bolsonaro didn’t pour lighter fluid to ignite the flames now ravaging the Amazon, but with his policies and rhetoric, he might as well have. The destruction he inspired—and allowed to rage with his days of stubborn unwillingness to douse the flames—has placed the planet at a hinge moment in its ecological history. “It is commonplace to describe the Amazon as the ‘world’s lungs’,” Franklin Foer writes. “Embedded in the metaphor is the sense that inherited ideas about the sovereignty of states no longer hold in the face of climate change. If the smoke clouds drifted only so far as the skies of São Paulo, other nations might be able to shrug off the problem as belonging to someone else. But one person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.”

  • Increasing Wildfires Threaten to Turn Northern Hemisphere’s Boreal Forests from Vital Carbon Stores into Climate Heaters

    Thanks in part to the carbon-hungry soils and peatlands they contain, boreal forests punch well above their weight as carbon sinks, covering 10 percent of the world’s land, but storing one-third of the land’s carbon. That stored carbon is under threat. Wildfires are becoming so frequent and intense that they are already turning some boreal forest areas from carbon sinks into net emitters.

  • Countries Most Exposed to Climate Change Face Higher Costs of Capital

    By 2030 poor countries will need to spend $140bn-300bn each year on adaptive measures, such as coastal defenses, if they want to avoid the harm caused by climate change. That estimate, from the UN Environment Program, assumes that global temperatures will be only 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, which seems unlikely. Adding to the costs, research suggests that these countries face higher interest rates than similar countries less exposed to climate risks. This raises the prospect of a vicious cycle, in which the most vulnerable countries pay more to borrow, making adaptation harder and them even more exposed.