• More effective radiation detection of cargo, baggage

    A new technique for radiation detection that could make radiation detection in cargo and baggage more effective and less costly for homeland security inspectors; the novel detection method relies on spectral shape discrimination (SSD), taking advantage of a new class of nanoporous materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)

  • Tasers do not cause cardiac complications: study

    Tasers are commonly used by law enforcement personnel worldwide as an intermediate-force option to subdue and apprehend potentially dangerous or combative suspects; tasers function by delivering a series of very brief high-voltage, low-current electric pulses that result in pain, muscle contraction and inhibition of voluntary movement; taser shots to the chest are no more dangerous than those delivered to other body locations, according to a new study

  • SFPD announce new mobile application for police in the field

    Earlier this week Mayor Edwin Lee of San Francisco joined the San Francisco Police Department and San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation (sf.citi) to announce a new mobile application which will enable police officers to report remotely from the field and share reports in real time, improving police department efficiency for officers by an estimated 40 percent daily

  • Industrial Defender offers new backup and disaster recovery services

    Industrial Defender the acquires Fandotech LLC, a provider of backup and disaster recovery services, enabling it to debut Survive Services, the company’s new backup and disaster recovery offering for ICS

  • B612 Foundation unveils first privately funded deep space mission

    A private group plans to launch its own space telescope and place it in orbit around the sun; the mission will collect information about Earth-threatening asteroids, but also look for asteroids that may contain valuable raw materials for mining

  • DHS awards Unisys IT services contract with a total potential value of $3 billion

    Unisys among thirty companies to compete for task orders for infrastructure support and operations and maintenance services under $3 billion contract; Unisys shares were trading sharply higher Wednesday morning after the company released the news about the contract

  • Forecast: sharp increase in world oil production capacity, risk of price collapse

    Oil production capacity is surging in the United States and several other countries at such a fast pace that global oil output capacity is likely to grow by nearly 20 percent by 2020, which could prompt a plunge or even a collapse in oil prices; the growth in oil output owes largely to a combination of high oil prices and new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing that are opening up vast new areas and allowing extraction of “unconventional” oil such as tight oil, oil shale, tar sands and ultra-heavy oil

  • Crowd dynamics explains disaster at cultural, sports events

    Physicists investigating a recent crowd disaster in Germany found that one of the key causes was that at some point the crowd dynamics turned turbulent, akin to behavior found in unstable fluid flows

  • Long-term priorities for U.S. nuclear physics program

    Nuclear physics is a discovery-driven enterprise aimed at understanding the fundamental nature of visible matter in the universe; for the past hundred years, new knowledge of the nuclear world has also directly benefited society through many innovative applications

  • CSC, Knight Point Systems receive DHS mentor- protégé award

    DHS Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU) selected two Virginia-based companies, CSC and Knight Point Systems, to receive the 2012 DHS Mentor-Protégé Team of the Year award

  • Predicting wave power helps double marine energy

    The energy generated from the oceans could be doubled using new methods for predicting wave power; researchers have devised a means of accurately predicting the power of the next wave in order to make the technology far more efficient, extracting twice as much energy as is currently possible

  • Loo turns poo into power

    Researchers have invented a new toilet system that will turn human waste into electricity and fertilizers and also reduce the amount of water needed for flushing by up to 90 percent compared to current toilet systems

  • Recycling nuclear fuel offers plentiful, clean energy

    Currently, only about 5 percent of the uranium in a fuel rod gets fissioned for energy in a nuclear reactor; after that, the spent rods, still containing about 95 percent uranium fuel, are taken out of the reactor and put into permanent storage; researchers say that recycling used nuclear fuel could produce hundreds of years of energy from just the uranium that has already been mined, all of it carbon-free

  • nCircle’s new solution offers coverage for six SCADA suppliers

    Critical infrastructure is designated by DHS and the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) as the assets, systems, and networks so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, and public health or safety; nCircle offers a security solution which covers vulnerabilities from six SCADA equipment suppliers

  • FTC charges businesses exposed sensitive information on P2P file-sharing networks

    The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has charged two businesses with illegally exposing the sensitive personal information of thousands of consumers by allowing peer to peer file-sharing software to be installed on their corporate computer systems