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Can You Trust AI? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t
Across the internet, devices and services that seem to work for you already secretly work against you. Smart TVs spy on you. Phone apps collect and sell your data. Many apps and websites manipulate you through dark patterns, design elements that deliberately mislead, coerce or deceive website visitors. This is surveillance capitalism, and AI is shaping up to be part of it.
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Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis Isn’t Going Away
It’s hard to make money selling home insurance in Florida. For one thing, the state is very vulnerable to hurricanes, and those hurricanes are getting stronger thanks to climate change. A legal loophole has made the state a hotbed for fraudulent litigation over insurance claims, and companies lose even more money fighting those lawsuits. And reinsurers are charging insurance companies much higher fees owing to climate change-driven disaster losses.
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Earth Just Had Its Hottest June on Record
The world just sweltered through its hottest June in the 174-year global climate record. Additionally, Earth’s ocean surface temperature anomaly — which indicates how much warmer or cooler temperatures are from the long-term average — were the highest ever recorded.
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Events That Never Happened Could Influence the 2024 Presidential Election – a Cybersecurity Researcher Explains Situation Deepfakes
The basic idea and technology of a situation deepfake are the same as with any other deepfake, but with a bolder ambition: to manipulate a real event or invent one from thin air. Situation deepfakes have already been used in recent weeks – the first in a Republican National Committee’s ad against President Joe Biden, the second in an anti-Trump ad by Ron DeSantis’s campaign.
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Bolstering Cyber Safety on Roads and Highways
A new research center is helping prevent potential cyberattacks that could threaten to impede the safe and efficient movement of people and goods in the United States and throughout the world.
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Satellite Security Lags Decades Behind the State of the Art
Thousands of satellites are currently orbiting the Earth, and there will be many more in the future. Researchers analyzed three current low-earth orbit satellites and found that, from a technical point of view, hardly any modern security concepts were implemented. Various security mechanisms that are standard in modern mobile phones and laptops were not to be found.
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Can We Use Plastic Waste to Build Roads, Buildings, and More?
A new study examines the current status, challenges, and needs of recycling plastics in a circular economy, and examine the long-term durability and environmental costs of doing so for use in infrastructure. Stanford engineers Zhiye Li and Michael Lepech discuss the potential for reusing discarded plastic in infrastructure applications.
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Addressing the Existential Threats from Artificial Intelligence
While the recent advancements in commercial AI can be disorienting and the claims of existential risks made by different groups of AI researchers can be terrifying, policymakers could respond with steps toward ensuring that AI is safely deployed.
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How an “AI-tocracy” Emerges
Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. But in China, the use of AI-driven facial recognition helps the regime repress dissent while enhancing the technology, researchers report.
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Adapting to Wildfires in a Warming World
Recent wildfires in Canada and California offer a preview of a world made far more dangerous by climate change, one in which smoke and fire exact an ever-increasing toll on public health and the economy.
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Climate Change Is Increasing Stress on Thousands of Aging Dams Across the U.S.
There are more than 91,000 dams across the U.S., in all 50 states, with diverse designs and purposes. The average dam age is 60 years, and more than 8,000 dams are over 90 years old. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ report card for the nation’s infrastructure gave U.S. dams a “D” grade.
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As Unprecedented Rainfalls Occur More Frequently, What Can Be Done About the Resulting Flash Floods?
Record rainfall is wreaking havoc in northern India and New York state as flash floods inundate communities. Experts have called for better resilience through ‘weatherproofing.’
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Software System Finds, Tracks Moving Objects as Small as a Pixel
A new patented software system developed at Sandia can find the curves of motion in streaming video and images from satellites, drones and far-range security cameras and turn them into signals to find and track moving objects as small as one pixel. The developers say this system can enhance the performance of any remote sensing application.
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Radar Can Help Fight Wildfires, Identify Flash-Flood Risks
Radar imaging technology can provide valuable insight into the location and extent of wildfires in remote Arctic and Subarctic forests, like those currently burning in Canada. Capable of penetrating clouds and smoke, and imaging day and night, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) can play a critical role in wildfire monitoring.
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Next-Generation Flow Battery Design Sets Records
Sugar additive plays a surprising role, boosting flow battery capacity and longevity for this grid energy resilience design. Researchers report that the flow battery, a design optimized for electrical grid energy storage, maintained its capacity to store and release energy for more than a year of continuous charge and discharge.
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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.