• New Madrid fault system may be shutting down

    Researchers find that the New Madrid fault system, which includes parts of Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Kentucky, is shutting down; major earthquake in the region may be avoided

  • New York City is especially vulnerable to rise in sea level

    Although low-lying Florida and Western Europe are often considered the most vulnerable to sea level changes, the northeast U.S. coast is particularly vulnerable because the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is susceptible to global warming

  • Dedicated band for medical devices

    Making medical records digital, and transmitting medical information among doctors, pharmacies, and insurance companies, would save a lot of money and avoid many medical mistakes; the same with allowing patients to stay at home and have the medical equipment they rely upon monitored and activated from afar; trouble is, such digital system is susceptible to network congestion and hacking

  • U.S. searching for a nuclear waste graveyard

    Congress has killed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository project, so the United States has no central location for storing nuclear waste; 50,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste that has already been produced by the U.S. nuclear plants; 30,000 metric tons more of nuclear waste is expected to be generated in the coming decades

  • Innovative approach to science and technology education in Pakistan

    A unique experiment: a combination of private money, government support, and intellectual leadership is helping to build the first private research school for science and engineering in Pakistan

  • Critics: Commercially driven deep packet inspection (DPI) is akin to wiretapping

    New technology now allows third parties to engage in deep packet inspection (DPI), a technique that makes it possible to peer inside packets of data transmitted across the Internet; data collected is then sold to other companies to allow them more targeted advertising

  • Andrew Marshall: Futurist-in-chief

    DARPA is not the only Pentagon outfit in which bold, out-of-the-box ideas and concepts are tested; the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), led since its 1973 inception by Andrew Marshall, should be recognized as well for its original work

  • France, Ireland to launch e-crime police training programs

    With the problem of cyber crime looming ever larger, European universities want the EC to back a plan to create an academically accredited cybercrime training program for law enforcement

  • Regulate armed robots before it's too late

    Unmanned machines now carry out more and more military and police missions; soon these robots will be allowed to make autonomous life-and-death decisions: when to shoot — and at whom; a philosopher argues that we should be more mindful of the ethical implications of this trend

  • New design allows for using less steel in concrete beams

    NC State researchers discover how to use 30 percent less reinforcing steel in the manufacture of the concrete beams; the success of the project is already drawing interest from the concrete industry

  • New anti-crime approach: vigilant windows

    Windows are coated with special polymer which contains nanoparticles that convert light into fluorescent radiation; this radiation is channeled to the edges of the window where it is detected by sensors; when a person approaches the window, the sensors wirelessly relay this currency information to a computer program, which alerts security officials of the potential intruder

  • Beads behavior may help in avalanche prediction

    Scientists blame the seeming impossibility of predicting the next big avalanche or earthquake on the inherent unpredictability of complex systems; a unique experiment, however, suggests that this idea may be wrong

  • New reactor design solves waste, weapon proliferation problems

    A new nuclear reactor design — called Traveling-Wave reactor — is noteworthy for three things: it comes from a privately funded research company, not the government; it would run on what is now waste, thus reducing dramatically the nuclear waste and weapon proliferation problems; and it could theoretically run for a couple of hundred years without refueling

  • Economists: copyright and patent laws killing innovation, hurting economy

    Two Washington University researchers argue that innovation is key to reviving the economy; trouble is, the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace

  • Economists: Markets outperform patents in promoting intellectual discovery

    Researchers say that the problem with patents is that they give the prize to the winner only; whoever comes in second or third walks away empty-handed; allowing people to benefit even if they only tackle a part of a problem might well lead to more collaboration, and to the faster development of an ultimate solution to the whole problem