• 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.

  • How Big Was the 2020 Beirut Explosion?

    On 4 August 2020, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history pulverized a Beirut port and damaged more than half the city. The explosion resulted from the detonation of tons of ammonium nitrate, a combustible chemical compound. The explosive yield estimates varied widely, and in some cases, were inconsistent with what would be expected based on the amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Beirut harbor.

  • Hydrogen Can Play Key Role in U.S. Decarbonization

    “Hydrogen is not really an energy source. It is rather an energy carrier or what we often call an energy vector,” says Berkeley Lab’s Ahmet Kusoglu. “So, you have to produce hydrogen from another energy source, store it, and then use or convert it. Hydrogen is a versatile and flexible energy carrier because it can be produced from various sources and for different applications. This flexibility is a key benefit of hydrogen versus other hydrocarbon fuels or energy storage technologies like batteries.”

  • Disrupting Asteroids to Protect the Earth

    If an asteroid is on an Earth-impacting trajectory, scientists typically want to stage a deflection, where the asteroid is gently nudged by a relatively small change in velocity, while keeping the bulk of the asteroid together. Researchers have examined how different asteroid orbits and different fragment velocity distributions affect the fate of the fragments, using initial conditions from a hydrodynamics calculation, where a 1-Megaton-yield device was deployed a few meters off the surface of a 100-meter diameter asteroid.

  • Record-Breaking Texas Drought More Severe Than Previously Thought

    In 2011, Texas experienced one of its worst droughts ever, with the dry, parched conditions causing more than $7 billion in crop and livestock losses, sparking wildfires, pushing power grids to the limit, and reducing reservoirs to dangerously low levels. A new study finds that the drought was worse than previously thought.

  • Safe Airspace in the Age of Drones

    Drones are becoming more and more ubiquitous, and are being used for everything from backyard fun to military operations. As the technologies for UAS continues to improve, so has the potential for them to be used in illegal and dangerous ways.

  • Hacking for Homeland Security

    On Monday (4 September), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the launch of the third Hacking for Homeland Security (H4HS). Participating students will focus on challenges associated with cybersecurity information sharing within transportation, the latency issue at screening checkpoints, and address greenspace issues after natural disasters.

  • New Tool Mappin Floods Since 1985 Will Aid Disaster Planning

    Free online World Flood Mapping Tool will help plan urban and agricultural development, effective flood defenses, disaster readiness, and identify supply chain vulnerabilities