• FBI better prepared to thwart bioterror attack on U.S.

    The FBI says that in the decade since deadly anthrax spores were sent through the mail in 2001, killing five people and sickening twenty-two others, it has made significant advances in efforts to prevent and identify bio-terror threats

  • Squirrel causes explosion, knocks out Connecticut town’s power

    Last week more than 14,000 homes in Greenwich, Connecticut were left without power after a squirrel managed to find its way into a substation and caused an explosion that sent flames shooting 150 feet into the air

  • A precursor to the next Stuxnet discovered

    Symantec reports the discovery of a sample malware that appeared to be very similar to Stuxnet, the malware which wreaked havoc in Iran’s nuclear centrifuge farms last summer; the new malware — dubbed Duqu — is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack; the threat was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code); Duqu gathers intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order more easily to conduct a future attack against another third party

  • Improving critical infrastructure protection

    Salt River Project (SRP), the U.S. third-largest public power utility, recently announced that it had teamed with Quantum Secure to help protect its facilities

  • Highly concentrated radiation found in Tokyo

    A recent study indicates that radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which suffered a meltdown following the 11 March earthquake and tsunami in Japan, has spread further and was more concentrated than previously thought

  • Cold War nuclear legacy challenges science, society

    Fifty years of U.S. nuclear weapons production, and government-sponsored nuclear energy research and production, generated contaminated soil and groundwater covering two million acres in thirty-five states; for most of that period, the U.S. government did not have environmental structures, technologies, or infrastructure to deal with the problem

  • Danish designer wins completion for new U.K. pylons

    There are 88,000 pylons in the United Kingdom, carrying 400,000 volts of electricity over thousands of miles across the country; the design of the pylons has barely changed in eighty years – and a winner has just been announced in the competition for a new pylon design

  • Waste glass cleans up water

    A simple method converts waste glass into a material which can be used to remove pollutants from contaminated water; the method uses colored glass which is being stockpiled in the United Kingdom as there is less recycling demand for green and brown bottles than there is for clear bottles

  • 'Thinking machines' will run future power grids

    Plans to develop the smart grid — a system that uses intelligent computer networks to manage electric power — cannot succeed without the creation of new “thinking machines” that can learn and adapt to new situations, from power outages along the grid to fluctuations in the power supply

  • Creating incentives to purchase disaster insurance

    Natural disasters have become more common and more expensive – still, death, injury, and financial losses can be reduced through incentives to purchase insurance and install protective measures

  • Engineering lessons of Fukushima

    Many engineers and scientists are still examining what happened at Fukushima during the earthqyake and tsunami of 11 March; one group, a Tsunami Loads-and-Effects Subcommittee sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), is preparing to publish early next year an approximately 350-page report

  • Blackberry service disruption spreads across North America

    Research in Motion announced earlier today that the 3-day disruption of the company’s e-mail services has now spread across North America; it is the worst such disruption of service in two years; analysts say it is a major blow to the already-struggling company; not only individuals, but also private companies and government agencies may now reconsider their reliance on Blackberrys as their preferred mode of communication

  • U.K. nuclear plants are safe: report

    The United Kingdom has finalized a review of the implications of the Fukushima disaster for the U.K. nuclear power industry; Dr. Mike Weightman, the author of the review, said that the “U.K. nuclear facilities have no fundamental safety weaknesses”

  • Calif. Allows warrantless searches of cell phones

    California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill which aimed to prohibit California police from conducting warrantless searches of the cell phones of people under arrest

  • Reducing exposure to groundwater arsenic

    Well diggers in Bangladesh will soon be able to take advantage of a cell phone-based data system, developed at the Earth Institute, to target safe groundwater aquifers for installing new wells that are not tainted with arsenic