• Firms with political ties may be bad investment

    It may pay to invest, but, counter intuitively perhaps, it might be worth more to invest in companies that do not have political ties; politically connected firms typically have greater cash holdings than non-connected firms; the reason: managers of such companies need to have more cash on hand to be used as a resource for the firms’ political friends; this hoarding of excess cash runs contrary to the notion of maximizing profit and value for a company’s shareholders

  • Per capita CO2 emissions in China reach EU levels

    Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)  increased by 3 percent last year; an estimated cumulative global total of 420 billion tons of CO2 has been emitted between 2000 and 2011 due to human activities, including deforestation; scientists suggest that in order to limit the rise in average global temperature to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, cumulative CO2 emissions in the period 2000–50 cannot do not exceed 1,000 to 1,500 billion tons

  • Cutting massive power use at big data companies in a flash

    Big data needs big power; the server farms that undergird the Internet run on a vast tide of electricity — Google, for example, uses enough electricity in its data centers to power about 200,000 homes; now, a team of engineers has a solution that could radically cut that power use — a new type of memory in companies’ servers that demands far less energy than the current systems

  • ObjectVideo drops Samsung from USITC investigation, but continues action against Bosch

    ObjectVideo drops action against Samsung, continues litigation against Bosch, charging video analytic technologies infringement

  • ElcomSoft, Pico Computing show world's fastest password-cracking solution

    Pico Computing manufactures a range of high-end hardware acceleration platforms, offering a computational equivalent of more than 2,000 dual-core processors in a single 4U chassis; ElcomSoft updates its range of password recovery tools, employing Pico Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based hardware to accelerate the recovery of passwords

  • Kratos receives $10 million contract to secure petrochemical site

    San Diego-based Kratos Defense & Security Solutions said it has recently received a multi-million dollar contract award to deploy a specialized security system at a petrochemical-related critical infrastructure location

  • Francisco Partners acquires biometrics provider Cross Match Technologies

    Francisco Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm, has acquired Cross Match Technologies, Inc., a provider of interoperable biometric identity management systems, applications, and services

  • Unmanned systems emulate animals’ conditioned fear-response mechanism for self-preservation

    When animals in the wild engage in eating or grazing, their eyes, ears, and sense of smell continuously monitor the environment for any sense of danger; researchers developed a similar conditioned fear-response mechanism for unmanned systems

  • Study suggests ways to cut billions from Pentagon budget

    The Department of Defense currently spends $400 billion each year acquiring products and services from defense contractors. About $100 billion of the money is spent on administrative costs; one way to reduce the high administrative cists could be “relational contracting,” a concept that has helped private industry dramatically reduce the costs of doing business

  • New contracting model would allow the Pentagon to do more with less

    Old-school, transactional product support paid defense contractors to ship spare parts and do repairs; it paid contractors to “fix-on-failure”; management experts say that DoD should adopt a different contracting model: Performance-Based Life Cycle Product Support Management, or PBL; under PBL, the military buys system performance, or outcomes, rather than products or services, and a contractor is responsible for providing a defined level of equipment readiness or availability, whatever the cost

  • Researchers discover a molecule's previously unknown role in fighting off E. coli

    Escherichia coli (abbreviated as E. coli) are a large and diverse family of bacteria; most strains of E. coli are harmless, but some can be deadly; E. coli creeps into the food supply through contamination by tiny (usually invisible) amounts of human or animal feces; many people may develop mild symptoms, but some suffer severe complications that can lead to kidney failure and death; researchers discover a molecule’s previously unknown role in fighting off E. coli and other bacterial infections, a discovery that could lead to new ways to protect people from these dangerous microorganisms

  • Emissions from oil sands-derived fuels too varied for uniform low-carbon standards

    Policy makers need to be cautious in setting new low-carbon standards for greenhouse gas emissions for oil sands-derived fuels as well as fuels from conventional crude oils; researchers found that lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions vary widely across both actual surface mining and in situ oil sands operations and conventional crude cases reported in the scientific literature, depending on individual project operating conditions, technology used, and other factors

  • Northrop Grumman's biodetection solution completes field test

    Northrop Grumman says its Next Generation Automated Detection System (NG-ADS) for homeland defense applications has successfully completed a field test and is ready for the program’s next phase

  • Two companies offer tower-based border security systems

    General Dynamics C4 Systems and EADS North America have joined forces to develop border protection and security systems which exploit the both companies’ strength; the team offers tower-based, integrated radar and sensor systems for an “always-on, ever-aware” picture of human activity in and around national borders

  • Space radiation detection technology to be used for homeland security

    Common radioactive sources emit gamma rays while nuclear bomb material emits both gamma rays and neutrons; because neutrons and gamma rays are electrically neutral, it is difficult to ascertain properties such as the direction of origin or energy level of the radioactive source; University of New Hampshire scientists are re-engineering instruments originally built for detecting radiation in space for homeland security purposes