• Engineering competition features Blue Tooth-capable trebuchet

    During the first Storm the Citadel Trebuchet Competition in Charleston over the weekend, Google employees combined Android cell phones, a computer the size of a credit card, and a Blue Tooth receiver to trigger a medieval weapon used in the twelfth century to destroy enemy fortifications

  • CAL U prepares its students for careers in homeland security

    California University of Pennsylvania (CAL U), an institute of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, offers various courses, certificates, and degrees in Homeland Security; a recent survey found that CAL U offers the nation’s best Internet-based degree programs; the acting dean of the college of liberal arts says: “the quality, education, experience, and student-centered attitude of our faculty, along with our connections with real world professional organizations makes us one of the top education institutes in our country”

  • U.S. learning from Canada to combat domestic radicalization

    The United States is partnering with Canada to learn how to better address the increasing threat from the domestic radicalization of Muslim Americans; the United States is looking to learn how Canadian law enforcement agencies have developed relationships with Muslim communities; for the past several years the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has been actively focusing on reaching out to Muslim communities and other groups that are the target of terrorist investigations; Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies placed domestic radicalization at the top of its priorities several years ago; domestic radicalization only recently became a national priority in the United States after a slew of failed attacks were perpetrated by American Muslims

  • ASIS and (ISC)2 join forces for annual security conference and more

    (ISC)2 will hold its first annual Security Congress in conjunction with ASIS International’s 57th annual Seminar and Exhibits conference in Orlando, Florida; the combined events are expected to attract more than 20,000 security professionals from around the world; during the conference the two organizations will jointly offer certification seminars for various security and technology-related credentials; (ISC)2 and ASIS signed a deal to work together and leverage their mutual strengths and membership bases; beyond the conference, the two organizations will work together on developing educational programming, research, and legislative issues; the ASIS International conference will be held from 19 September 2011 to 22 September 2011

  • TSA and ICE to cut down on alien flight lessons

    Several months after immigration officials arrested Thiago DeJesus, an immigrant owner of a flight school in Stow, Massachusetts, and thirty-three of his Brazilian pupils for being in the United States illegally, officials have not instituted new safeguards to prevent something similar from happening again

  • Risk-analysis models could not predict Arab world upheavals

    Political instability is influenced by everything from the weather to local economic conditions and infant mortality rates; these factors interact in complex ways, and data quality can be low; together, this makes for a daunting forecasting challenge; says one expert: “All of our models are bad, some are less bad than others”

  • Wine testing technology to scan for liquids at airports

    Scanner technology originally developed at the University of California, Davis, to test wine in the bottle is being re-engineered to tell shampoo from explosives at airports; this means travelers could be able to carry soda cans or full-size tubes of toothpaste through security and onto jetliners in the not-too-distant future

  • Abbott shows new pathogen detector

    Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Abbott unveiled a new assay system that can accurately detect seventeen different bio-threat pathogens; among different bio-agents targeted in the new test are Bacillus anthracis, E. coli, salmonella, Ebola virus, and avian influenza viruses; the company says the new method provides results in less than eight hours

  • Acoustic gunfire detection devices heading to the field

    Technological developments may one day create artificial soldiers, but until they come along, the United States and other countries will continue to rely on human soldiers; the militaries thus want to preserve as many of their soldier’s lives as possible; to that end, Shoulder-Worn Acoustic Targeting System (SWATS), which helps Marines zero in on enemy sniper fire, is a godsend to the United States; asymmetric warfare favors the forces that can strike and runaway unharmed, but with plentiful acoustic sensors in the field it will be that much harder for snipers to ambush U.S. soldiers and live to escape

  • Ancient catastrophic drought a warning about current warming trends

    Extreme megadrought in Afro-Asian region likely had consequences for Paleolithic cultures; the records show that one of the most widespread and intense droughts of the last 50,000 years or more struck Africa and Southern Asia 17,000 to 16,000 years ago; the “H1 megadrought” was one of the most severe climate trials ever faced by anatomically modern humans; Africa’s Lake Victoria, now the world’s largest tropical lake, dried out, as did Lake Tana in Ethiopia, and Lake Van in Turkey; the Nile, Congo, and other major rivers shriveled

  • Common clam to help clean oil-filled waters

    Clams are bottom-dwelling filter feeders, obtaining nutrients by filtering the water around them; researchers at Southeastern Louisiana University are studying the lowly Rangia clam to determine whether the organism can contribute to helping clean oil-polluted waters

  • A warming world would add billions to shipping costs

    As anyone with a boat knows, many sorts of marine life can attach themselves to a hull below the waterline; on a large ship, the weight of such hitchhikers — everything from algae to barnacles to small colonies of coral — can weigh as much as ten tons; the U.S. shipping industry spends more than $36 billion each year in added fuel costs to overcome the drag induced by clinging marine life or for anti-fouling paint that prevents that life from hitching a ride in the first place; global warming will see the problem of hull-clinging creatures worsen substantially

  • States challenge federal policy on nuclear waste storage

    The search for a permanent solution to the storage of nuclear waste continues as three states sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last week over its new policy on spent fuel; in December NRC issued a new policy stating that nuclear waste could be safely stored at a power plant for sixty years after a reactor went out of service; the issue of nuclear storage has become increasingly contentious after the Obama administration ruled out the use of a Department of Energy storage site in Nevada in 2009; nuclear plants have been forced to turn temporary on-site storage into long-term facilities as no permanent site has been built; the Obama administration launched a commission to find alternatives for the permanent nuclear storage site in Nevada that it cancelled

  • Budget cuts will hamper U.S. outbreak response

    Public health advocates are criticizing the Obama administration’s 2012 budget request for cutting funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) emergency preparedness and core disease prevention programs; advocates believe that these cuts will seriously hamper the ability of the United States to respond effectively to large disease outbreaks or a biological terrorist attack; since 2005 funding for these programs has been reduced by nearly 30 percent, and in 2008 more than 20,000 public health jobs have been cut while thousands of workers have had their hours reduced; GAO reports warn that the federal government needs to strengthen its abilities to respond to pandemics, bioterrorism, and natural disasters

  • To boldly go -- but at a leisurely pace

    In 1961 President John Kennedy committed the United States to land a man on the moon “before this decade is out”; DARPA new space project has a more lackadaisical time table: building an interstellar starship capable of carrying people to other star systems than our own by the year 2100AD