• Top Five most awesome robots

    In the last decade, robots have often been employed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, usually to seek out hidden bombs. More and more of these the robots are now being adopted by first response agencies to help in search-and-rescue operations in the wake of disasters. The growing interest in – and usefulness of — robotics have also inspired a series of competitions and challenges, some of which are directed at high-school and college students, to encourage budding scientists to go into the field of robotics.

  • FDA to require imported food to be inspected at the source

    Each year about forty-eight million Americans get sick, some 128,000 are hospitalized, and about 3,000 dies from foodborne illnesses. Companies importing food into the United States will be held to higher safety and health standards if new proposed rules by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are passed. Under the proposal, the FDA would require importers to inspect food abroad before the food reaches American ports.

  • Shale gas threatens U.S. nuclear power industry

    The U.S. nuclear industry is facing a new enemy, and it is not anti-nuclear peacenicks. It is the shale gas boom, which on Tuesday claimed yet another victim when Entergy Corporation said it would close its Vermont Yankee reactor ahead of schedule. It is the fourth U.S nuclear plant to be closed this year, as utilities have concluded that investing in refurbishing older reactors is no longer economically viable.

  • Sandy Task Force issues sixty-nine rebuilding recommendations

    The Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, appointed by President Obama and chaired by Housing and Urban Development secretary Shaun Donovan,  last week release its much-anticipated report, in which it  lays out sixty-nine policy recommendations for improving areas affected by Hurricane Sandy last October. The report stressed the importance of investment in new and better construction to withstand increasingly dangerous storms and surges caused by climate change.

  • Aquifer supplying a third of U.S. irrigated groundwater depleting quickly: study

    The High Plains Aquifer of Kansas — also called the Ogallala Aquifer — supplies 30 percent of the U.S. irrigated groundwater. New study finds that if current irrigation trends continue, 69 percent of the groundwater stored in the High Plains Aquifer will be depleted in fifty years.

  • Post-Sandy infrastructure must be more resilient: Sandy Task Force

    The task force appointed by President Barack Obama, charged with developing a strategy for rebuilding areas damaged by Superstorm Sandy, has urged coastal communities to recognize that owing to climate change, storms are going to be more frequent and more destructive, and that floods are going to occur more frequently. The best way to prepare for the more extreme weather ahead is to build a more robust and resilient infrastructure that can withstand the more demanding challenges.

  • ASIS Annual Seminar and Exhibit “the epicenter for security education and technology”

    ASIS Annual Seminar and Exhibit, which will take place 24-27 September in Chicago, may well be the epicenter for security education and technology, says Geoff Craighead, ASIS president. With a show floor spanning 230,000 sq. feet, attendees from more than eighty countries, more than 200 education sessions, and a variety of ways to connect with colleagues and strengthen business relationships, ASIS 2013 is the place to be.

  • New reactor design makes nuclear power competitive with natural gas

    San Diego-based General Atomics has applied for funding of several hundred millions from the U.S Department of Energy to commercialize a nuclear reactor which, the firm claims, could cut the cost of nuclear power by as much as 40 percent. The new design replaces water with helium as a coolant, allowing the plant to operate at higher temperatures, thus increasing the efficiency of the power plan and reducing the amount of waste needing storage.

  • Catastrophes cost global insurance industry more than $20 billion in first half of 2013

    Total economic losses from disasters in the first half of 2013 reached $56 billion. Insured losses from natural catastrophes totaled $17 billion, with flooding a main driver. Around 7,000 lives were lost as a result of natural catastrophes and man-made disasters.

  • Sandy shows need for more effective preparedness, resiliency standards

    The rebuilding efforts following the devastation wreaked by Superstorm Sandy have triggered a discussion over preparedness and resiliency in America’s commercial and residential buildings.Some experts callfor a presidential appointment of a building resilience “’czar”’ with authority to coordinate and seek synergies between public and private sector initiatives.

  • U.S. power plants, utilities face growing cyber vulnerability

    American power plants and utility companies face a growing cyber vulnerability. No U.S power plant has so far suffered a significant cyberattack, even if small-scale attacks are nearly constant, but experts say preventative actions must be taken to ensure safety. Utilities provide services which, if disrupted for long periods of time, may result in economic chaos and may even lead to social unrest.

  • Breakthrough fuel cell technology: the future of electricity generation

    We currently rely upon an increasingly vulnerable electrical grid to provide the energy we need. The best way to decrease that vulnerability is through distributed energy, that is, by making our own energy on-site. A breakthrough fuel cell technology promises to provide always-on electricity to businesses, homes, and eventually automobiles, at about one-tenth the cost and one-tenth the size of current commercial fuel cell systems. The technology allows people to generate their own electricity with a system nearly impervious to hurricanes, thunderstorms, cyberattacks, derechos, and similar dangers, while simultaneously helping the environment.

  • U.S. nuclear reactors vulnerable to terrorist attack: study

    More than ten years after the 9/11 hijackers considered flying a fully loaded passenger jet into a Manhattan area nuclear reactor, U.S. commercial and research nuclear facilities remain inadequately protected against two credible terrorist threats — the theft of bomb-grade material to make a nuclear weapon, and sabotage attacks intended to cause a reactor meltdown. A new report finds that none of the 104 commercial nuclear power reactors in the United States is adequately protected — but among the most vulnerable are eleven reactors in California, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. One of these reactors, on the grounds of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is among the three research reactors fueled with bomb-grade uranium, and is located in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Gaithersburg, less than twenty-five miles from the White House.

  • The U.S. Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) tries to keep food safe

    The U.S. Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) has 172 laboratories, including 39 federal, 113 state, and 17 local labs across the states and Puerto Rico. Randy Layton, FERN director, discussed the agency’s work in a July meeting of the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP).

  • Climate change was proximate, not primary, cause of 2012 Great Plains drought: study

    From May to July 2012, the Great Plains region of the western United States faced a powerful and unpredicted drought. Following seven months of normal rainfall, the drought was one of the largest deviations from seasonal precipitation rates seen in the region since observations began in 1895. Researches find that the drought fell within the bounds of natural atmospheric variability. The strength of the drought, they suggest, was a consequence of the multiple complex nonlinear systems that make up the climate system and did not critically depend on the existence of a strong external forcing.