• How Marsh Grass Protects Shorelines

    As climate change brings greater threats to coastal ecosystems, new research can help planners leverage the wave-damping benefits of marsh plants.

  • Growing the U.S. AI Workforce

    A new policy brief Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) addresses the need for a clearly defined artificial intelligence education and workforce policy.

  • Quick Detection of Uranium Isotopes Helps Safeguard Nuclear Materials

    Researchers have developed a rapid way to measure isotopic ratios of uranium and plutonium collected on environmental swipes, which could help International Atomic Energy Agency analysts detect the presence of undeclared nuclear activities or material.

  • U.S. Hit with $18 Billion Weather and Climate Disasters So Far This Year

    The United States saw an unprecedented eighteen separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first nine months of the year, September 2021 was the 5th-warmest September on record.

  • Enough with the Quackery, Pinker Says

    “Another contributor [to the opposition to vaccines] is the Myside bias, probably the most powerful of all the cognitive biases, namely, if something becomes an article of faith within your own coalition, and if promoting it earns you status, that is what you believe,” says Harvard’s professor of psychology Steven Pinker, whose latest book — Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters – has just been published. “It’s somewhat arbitrary which positions get attached to which coalitions…. It used to be the tree-hugging Mr. and Ms. Naturals who were suspicious of vaccines — a romantic opposition to science and tech made vaccine resistance a leftish cause. But now it’s more attached to the right. In either case, people are more adamant about protecting the sacred beliefs of their political tribe than looking at the best evidence.”

  • Making Desalinated Water Safer, Cheaper

    Approximately 80 percent of drinking water in Israel is desalinated water, coming from the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli scientists and colleagues develop an effective and low-cost way to remove toxic boron from water in the process of desalination.

  • Forensic Analysis of Lipstick Trace

    Forensic scientists find a new way of identifying brands of lipstick at a crime scene without removing evidence from its bag.

  • Deep Learning Helps Predict Traffic Crashes Before They Happen

    A deep model was trained on historical crash data, road maps, satellite imagery, and GPS to enable high-resolution crash maps that could lead to safer roads.

  • Urban Areas More Likely to Have Precipitation-Triggered Landslides

    Urban areas may be at greater risk for precipitation-triggered landslides than rural areas, according to a new study that could help improve landslide predictions and hazard and risk assessments. Researchers found that urban landslide hazard was up to 10 times more sensitive to variations in precipitation than in rural areas.

  • Assessing Global Electricity Generation Potential from Rooftop Solar Photovoltaics

    The first detailed global assessment of the electricity generation potential of rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) technology has important implications for sustainable development and climate change mitigations efforts.

  • Estimates U.S. Recoverable Helium: 306 Billion Cubic Feet

    Helium is a lighter-than-air gas that is primarily used in medical imaging such as MRIs, semiconductor manufacturing, laser welding, aerospace, defense and energy programs. The United States is the leading supplier of helium for the world, producing about 44 percent of the total global production. The natural gas reservoirs of the United States contain an estimated 306 billion cubic feet of recoverable helium, according to a new report from the USGS.

  • New Treatment Technology Could Reduce Nuclear Waste Burden

    Researchers have developed a novel treatment technology that may help to significantly reduce the burden of nuclear waste. This breakthrough could therefore significantly speed up disposal of such material and reduce the overall cost of dealing with our legacy waste.

  • Earthquake System Model with Better Detection Capabilities

    researchers developed a machine learning model that improves the accuracy of detecting earthquakes by 14.5 percent compared to the most accurate current existing model.

  • Nuclear Physics Used to probe Floridan Aquifer Threatened by Climate Change

    Florida is known for water. Between its beaches, swamps, storms and humidity, the state is soaked. And below its entire surface lies the largest freshwater aquifer in the nation. As rising sea levels threaten coastal areas, scientists are using an emerging nuclear dating technique to track the ins and outs of water flow.

  • New, $125 Million Project Aims to Detect Emerging Viruses

    A new project, funded with $125 million from USAID, aims to detect and characterize unknown viruses which have the potential to spill over from wildlife and domestic animals to human populations. The 5-year project is expected to yield 8,000 to 12,000 novel viruses, which researchers will then screen and sequence the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health.