• Increase in groundwater demands due to climate change

    As precipitation becomes less frequent due to climate change, lake and reservoir levels will drop and people will increasingly turn to groundwater for agricultural, industrial, and drinking water needs; the resource accounts for nearly half of all drinking water worldwide, but recharges at a much slower rate than aboveground water sources and in many cases is nonrenewable

  • NSA pushes for greater federal cybersecurity role

    General Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other intelligence officials are pushing the Obama administration to expand the role of the NSA in federal cybersecurity initiatives

  • Senators compete over critical infrastructure cybersecurity bill

    Lawmakers are currently struggling to come to a consensus on which government agency should be in charge of securing the nation’s cyber infrastructure

  • AlertEnteprises wins three awards for critical infrastructure security tech

    Last week AlertEnterprise announced that it had been given three awards for its identity and access management technology used to help secure critical infrastructure

  • Poultry feathers-based filters remove arsenic from water

    Thousands of people die each year in developing countries from drinking arsenic-contaminated water; researchers develop inexpensive filters made from the modified protein (keratin) in poultry feathers to remove arsenic from drinking water

  • Energy from differences between salt- and fresh water – produced inland

    Production of energy from the difference between salt water and fresh water is most convenient near the oceans, but now, using an ammonium bicarbonate salt solution, researchers can combine bacterial degradation of waste water with energy extracted from the salt-water fresh-water gradient to produce power anywhere

  • What U.S. can learn from EU chemicals law

    U.S. industry and environmental groups agree that the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 needs to be modernized better to protect public health and the environment; there is no consensus, however, on what the reform should look like; researchers suggest that the United States may want to look at how the EU regulates chemicals

  • Asteroid 2011 AG5 worries to be justified – or not -- in February 2023

    Asteroid 2011 AG5 is one of 8,744 near-Earth objects that have been discovered; it is approximately 460 feet (140 meters) in size; it is on a collision course with Earth for 5 February 2040 – but we will k now for sure in February of 2023, when it will pass Earth no closer than about one million miles, making it possible for scientists to plot its future trajectory

  • Researchers develop record-breaking plastic solar cell

    Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have made a breakthrough with plastic solar cells, creating a record-breaking polymer cell that converts 10.6 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity

  • New report paints dire picture of Japanese Fukushima response

    A new report reveals that last year’s nuclear crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi atomic energy plant was dangerously close to spiraling out of control as senior officials bickered internally, lacked critical information on the extent of the damage, and covertly considered the possibility of evacuating Tokyo

  • Robots to climb and assemble structures, making construction safer

    In the near future, armies of robots could nimbly be crawling up towers and skyscrapers to make repairs, so humans do not have to; the design of the truss pieces, which have ridges and specially designed locks so the robot can manipulate them, is as important as the robot itself, and researchers express the hopes that in the future such robot-friendly building components would be standardized for widespread use

  • Physicists predict when brittle materials fail

    It does not happen often, but structures like bridges, airplanes, and buildings do fail, sometimes catastrophically; what are the odds, and how can it be prevented? Researchers just published new theoretical insights into the probability of structural failures, based on hundreds of thousands of computer simulations

  • Smart outlet to bring flexibility, resiliency to smart grid architecture

    Researchers developed an experimental “smart outlet” that autonomously measures, monitors, and controls electrical loads with no connection to a centralized computer or system; the goal of the smart outlet and similar innovations is to make the power grid more distributed and intelligent, capable of reconfiguring itself as conditions change

  • Cheaper natural gas leads to reduced U.S. carbon emissions

    In the United States, lower emission from power plants in 2009 was driven by competitive pricing of natural gas versus coal; Harvard University researchers develop a model which identifies the relationship between the cost of electricity generation from coal and gas and the fraction of electricity generated from coal

  • Future aircraft could capture, re-use some of their own power

    When an Airbus 320 lands, a combination of its weight and speed gives it around three megawatts peak available power; researchers work on making the aircraft of tomorrow contribute to their power needs by harnessing energy from the wheel rotation of their landing gear to generate electricity