• The Western hemisphere’s largest seawater desalination plant to be built in California

    The San Diego County Water Authority announced plans to build the Western hemisphere’s largest seawater desalination plant; the plant will produce fifty million gallons of fresh water per day, enough to supply about 7 percent of the San Diego region in 2020

  • U.S. manufacturers moving their manufacturing operations back to U.S.

    Increasingly, U.S. firms are moving or considering moving their manufacturing operations back to domestic soil from overseas; fueling the trend are rising labor costs in emerging countries, high oil prices, and increasing transportation costs, global risks such as political instability, and other factors

  • Different industries will benefit from different election results

    The outcome of the presidential election will not only affect taxpayers, but several industries as well; if Mitt Romney wins the election, defense contractors, oil, coal, and big banks should expect a brake on new regulations and roll back of some existing regulations, as well as tax breaks; if Barack Obama is given a second term by the voters, green energy firms, hospitals, and health insurance firms will likely benefit

  • Trading water: the pros and cons

    Water is a commodity, and water rights can be freely traded in an open market. Proponents of the free market approach argue that it leads to the most efficient allocation of water resources, as it would for any other commodity

  • Former DHS official says U.S. should go on cybersecurity offensive

    Stewart Baker, the first assistant secretary for policy at DHS under President George W. Bush, has a straightforward theory when it comes to cyber security in the United States: “To prevail in the cybersecurity war, defense is not enough”; not all cuber experts agree with him

  • Experts warn of growing cyber security risks to U.S., criticize Congress’s inaction

    U.S.and Russian cyber experts are trying to scare officials into improving cybersecurity protection in the United Statesand around the world; cyber attacks against critical infrastructure escalate in scope and severity; soon, Kaspersky Lab’s Eugene Kaspersky said: “If previous viruses were like bicycles,then the Stuxnet worm that damaged uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant in Iran two years ago would be a plane and the latest programs, dubbed Flame and Gauss,would be space shuttles”

  • Explosives dumped into Gulf of Mexico pose big problems

    Millions of pounds of unexploded bombs and other military ordnance that were dumped decades ago in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as off the coasts of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, could now pose serious threats to shipping lanes and the 4,000 oil and gas rigs in the Gulf, warns two oceanographers

  • China homeland security and public safety market to reach $105 billion by 2020

    By 2014 China’s homeland security and public safety market will replace the U.S. market as the leading national homeland security and public safety market; the market will grow from $45 billion in 2012 to $105 billion by 2020

  • Security Essen 2012: 39,000 attendees, 1,086 exhibitors

    Security Essen, the international forum for solutions relating to everything having to do with civil security and fire protection technology was held 25-28 September in Essen, Germany; more than 39,000 trade visitors from 115 countries were offered information from 1,086 exhibitors from forty nations

  • Probability maps help detect food contamination

    Researchers demonstrate how developing a probability map of the food supply network using stochastic network representation might shorten the time it takes to track down contaminated food sources; stochastic mapping shows what is known about how product flows through the distribution supply chain and provides a means to express all the uncertainties in potential supplier-customer relationships that persist due to incomplete information

  • Law enforcement can store, identify millions of voice samples using new software

    Everyone this day can be identified by a fingerprint, DNA, or even a picture. Now, with the help of a Russian company, the FBI will soon be using voice recognition to identify people; the FBI says voice biometrics will be a “reliable and consistent means of identification for use in remote recognition”

  • How vulnerable is the U.S. to agro-terror attack?

    Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States has spent billions of dollars to make the country safer from another catastrophic event, but little of that money, and little attention, have been directed toward preventing, coping with, and recovering from a terrorist agro-attack; how vulnerable is the United States to an attack on its food system?

  • Technology soon to make drones deadlier, more autonomous

    Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become America’s main weapon in the campaign against terrorists  — at the forefront are the Predator and the Reaper — and technological changes would soon make them even deadlier; in the next decade drones will be faster and carry more weapons than today’s versions; they will also have better sensors and more sophisticated computers, allowing them to plan and execute attacks with little human participation

  • Chile relies on new technologies to cope with frequent earthquakes

    Citizens of Chile are used to the ground shaking beneath their feet; in the past two years alone Chile has experienced more than forty earthquakes with magnitudes of six or higher; with so many earthquakes and the potential of thousands dying yearly, Chilean authorities are using new methods to protect their citizens from death and buildings from damage

  • Debate over causes of levee failure during Katrina intensifies

    A court case in which residents of two sections of New Orleans are suing a construction group has put millions of dollars at stake; residents of the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish residents claim that Washington Group International (WGI), an Amy Corps of Engineers contractor, removed several buildings and pilings from land along the Industrial Canal as part of a construction plan to expand the canal’s shipping lock, then failed adequately to plug the holes left behind; the holes allowed rainwater from Hurricane Katrina to seep underneath the 14-foot wall, essentially lifting the wall and allowing the areas to be flooded