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Do armed guards prevent school shootings?
The presence of guns in schools is a fact of life for millions of American children. Forty-three percent of public schools had an armed law enforcement officer during the 2015-2016 school year. Does increasing armed school security could reduce deaths from active shootings or deter the attacks in the first place? Experts say the data is not encouraging. Guns have stopped some mass shootings — but not usually in schools.
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Firearm deaths surges in school-age children
Firearm-related deaths in school-age children are increasing at alarming rates in the United States where homicide rates are about 6- to 9-fold higher than those in comparably developed countries. This epidemic poses increasingly major clinical, public health and policy challenges.
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Crowdsourcing speeds up monitoring of earthquake
Data produced by Internet users can help to speed up the detection of earthquakes. Fast and accurate information is essential in the case of earthquakes: Epicenter location, depth and magnitude are minimum requirements to reliably estimate their possibly catastrophic consequences.
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Polymers help minimize fuel explosions and fires from accidents and terrorist acts
When an act of terrorism or a vehicle or industrial accident ignites fuel, the resulting fire or explosion can be devastating. On Tuesday, scientists described how lengthy but microscopic chains of polymers could be added to fuel to significantly reduce the damage from these terrifying incidents without impacting performance.
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Turning incident scenes into virtual 3D models
When officers arrive at a crime or crash scene, they have to spend a lot of time looking for evidence, processing it, taking photos of it, and documenting. To help make this process more efficient, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has teamed up with the Israeli Police to invest in a new tool.
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Improving canine detection of explosives
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has awarded $564,988 in funding to Auburn University for two research and development (R&D) projects designed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of canines trained to detect explosives.
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In disasters, Twitter users with large networks get out-tweeted
New study shows that when it comes to sharing emergency information during natural disasters, timing is everything. The study on Twitter use during hurricanes, floods and tornadoes offers potentially life-saving data about how information is disseminated in emergency situations, and by whom. Unlikely heroes often emerge in disasters, and the same is true on social media.
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Killer robots already exist, and they’ve been here a very long time
The question is not so much whether we should use autonomous weapon systems in battle – we already use them, and they take many forms. Rather, we should focus on how we use them, why we use them, and what form – if any – human intervention should take.
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Israel’s Carbyne, RapidSOS partner to improve 911 calls
Dialing 911 in an emergency is something that we’ve all been instructed to do since childhood. And old-fashioned, simple dialing is what most of us are still doing, even in an age of far more sophisticated technology. Next-gen public safety tech company will provide call takers with more informative real-time data to help first responders locate and treat callers.
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California hospitals to pay billions for seismic safety upgrades
California hospitals would need to make substantial investments—between $34 billion and $143 billion statewide—to meet 2030 state seismic safety standards, according to a new report.
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Recaptured Italian former militant Battisti admits 1970s murders
Former communist militant Cesare Battisti has admitted four murders carried out in the 1970s, during Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead,” weeks after being jailed in Italy for the killings that were part of a failed bid to spark a far-left revolution.
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Mapping out virtual world for U.S. military
When the U.S. military interviewed more than 100 experts about conflicts in Syria and Iraq, the resulting intelligence was so extensive that analysts joked about needing executive summaries for the executive summaries. Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory convert complex data into 3D digital visualizations to provide spatial and geographic context.
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Russia sends military planes to Venezuela
Russia, a key ally of under-siege President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, sent two planes with military supplies and troops to shore up the Maduro regime. Russia had already sent two Tu-160 strategic bombers to Venezuela in December to support Maduro. Three months ago the two nations held military exercises in Venezuela.
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Chances of UN banning killer robots looking increasingly remote
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots warns chances of achieving a U.N. treaty banning the development, production and use of fully autonomous lethal weapons, also known as killer robots, are looking increasingly remote. Experts from some 80 countries are attending a weeklong meeting to discuss the prospect of negotiating an international treaty.
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Detecting radioactive material remotely
Physicists have developed a powerful new method to detect radioactive material. By using an infrared laser beam to induce a phenomenon known as an electron avalanche breakdown near the material, the new technique is able to detect shielded material from a distance. The method improves upon current technologies that require close proximity to the radioactive material.
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The long view
Americas’ Longest-Running Insurgency: Lessons for U.S. Longest-Running War
In 2016, Colombia achieved a remarkable success by seemingly bringing to an end the Western Hemisphere’s longest-running insurgency. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been at war with government forces for more than fifty years. And yet here was a negotiated settlement by which two parties that had been fighting for generations agreed to lay down their arms—by which the guerrilla organization itself would be brought into the government’s formal power structures. The case raises important questions—not least for a U.S. government that watches the clock on its own counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan tick ever closer to two decades. How was this possible? And are there lessons that can be exported and applied to other intransigent conflicts, like Afghanistan?
Truth and Fearmongering: Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository
Is it a good idea to store 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in a repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain? Many Nevada politicians say it is a bad idea, but scientists argue that the facts do not support the fears these politicians stoke. These scientists say that Colorado, whose surface rock contains about a billion tons of uranium, should have much more to worry about than Nevada. One scientist says: “If the Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River.”
Sounding the Alarm about Another Kind of 9/11
Richard Clarke knows some things about clear and present dangers. As the first U.S. counterterrorism czar, he tried to alert important White House decision-makers before September 11 about the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but those warnings were largely ignored; afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures. These days, Clarke is trying to get people to think hard about the next big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.
Bashar al-Assad’s Updated, Sinister Version of Biological Warfare
Biological warfare is generally understood as the deliberate wartime introduction of a lethal pathogen with the intent to kill or maim. Syria under President Bashar al-Assad is pursuing a sinister variation—one with long and dangerous historical precedents. Assad’s government has allowed pathogens normally controlled by public health measures—such as clean water, sanitation, waste disposal, vaccination, and infection control—to emerge as biological weapons through the deliberate destruction and withholding of those measures. The conflict has in effect reversed public health advances to achieve levels of disease not seen since the Napoleonic era.
Jettisoning Arms Control Endangers America’s Edge in Great-Power Politics
The Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy identified the “reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia as the foremost threat to U.S. national security. Both the White House and Pentagon insist that the U.S. military needs enhanced capabilities to counter growing threats such as Russian hypersonic missiles and new Chinese warships and submarines. Yet, as the Trump administration escalates its hard-power focus, it is systematically eroding the restrictions on hard power that historically have limited the strength of potential great-power challengers.
460,000 Premature Deaths: The Horror That Was Nuclear Weapons Testing
In March 1954, over the Bikini Atoll, the United States detonated a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb —one thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It was the largest explosion ever set off by Americans, and also the dirtiest. Researchers have now found that, more than sixty years after the nuclear tests the United States conducted in the area, the levels of radiation in several Marshall Island atolls, exceed that found at Chernobyl or Fukushima. The United States also detonated hundreds of atomic bombs in Nevada, and a 2017 study suggested that fallout from the Nevada nuclear testing could have led to between 340,000 and 460,000 premature deaths, mostly Americans and mainly through cancer.