• Extreme Weather is Battering the World. What's the Cause?

    Floods and heatwaves across Africa, deluges in southern Brazil, drought in the Amazon, and extreme heat across Asia, including India: the news has been full of alarming weather disaster stories this year, and for good reason. Climate change is likely fueling a surge in extreme weather events across the planet. It could be a troubling sign of things to come.

  • Beyond Watermarks: Content Integrity Through Tiered Defense

    Watermarking is often discussed as a solution to the problems posed by AI-generated content. However, watermarking is inadequate without other methods of detecting and sorting out AI-generated content.

  • Elaine Liu: Charging Ahead

    The U.S. Department of Energy reports that the number of public and private EV charging ports nearly doubled in the past three years, and many more are in the works. Users expect to plug in at their convenience, charge up, and drive away. But what if the grid can’t handle it? An MIT senior calculates how renewables and EVs impact the grid.

  • Solar Geoengineering to Cool the Planet: Is It Worth the Risks?

    There is no international, national or state framework that currently governs geoengineering. As a result, one worrisome future scenario is that climate impacts in a particularly vulnerable country will be so severe that it resorts to deploying stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI, also called solar radiation management or SRM) on its own before the world is ready for it. This could cause political instability or provoke retribution from other countries that suffer its effects.

  • U.S.-China Trade War: Why Joe Biden Has Raised the Stakes

    In a move to safeguard domestic industries and address unfair trade practices, the US president has quadrupled tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and raised levies on other green tech.

  • Addressing the Colorado River Crisis

    Sustaining the American Southwest is the Colorado River. But demand, damming, diversion, and drought are draining this vital water resource at alarming rates. The future of water in the Southwest was top of mind for participants and attendees at the 10th Annual Eccles Family Rural West Conference.

  • Making Batteries Takes Lots of Lithium: Almost Half of It Could Come from Pennsylvania Wastewater

    Most batteries used in technology like smartwatches and electric cars are made with lithium that travels across the world before even getting to manufacturers. But what if nearly half of the lithium used in the U.S. could come from Pennsylvania wastewater?

  • Investigation: How Russia's Warplanes Get Their 'Brain Power' From the West, Despite Sanctions

    The sanctions Western countries have imposed on Russia have many vulnerabilities –a recurring complaint for Kyiv as, handicapped by a deficit of weapons and ammunition, it watches Russian forces advance, hammering soldiers, civilians, and vital infrastructure.

  • Tech Diplomacy: What It Is, and Why It’s Important

    We need to get used to a new concept in international security: tech diplomacy. It means technological collaboration across sectors and between countries, but the simplicity of the idea shouldn’t disguise its importance.

  • Cybersecurity Education Varies Widely in U.S.

    Cybersecurity programs vary dramatically across the country, a review has found. The authors argue that program leaders should work with professional societies to make sure graduates are well trained to meet industry needs in a fast-changing field.

  • Feds Should Leave Campus Unrest to Others

    The federal government should not inject itself into debates largely occurring in civil—free—society. It is not the proper federal role, and it threatens to reduce rather than promote harmony. Some of the things said during the pro-Palestine protests might well be horrible, inaccurate things to say. Those who say them might have antisemitic motives. But it is extremely dangerous to put such speech off limits.

  • U.S. Department of Education Opens Investigation into Anti-Semitism at Berkeley K-12 Public Schools

    The U.S. Department of Education has opened a formal investigation into a complaint that the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) failed to address non-stop “severe and persistent” bullying and harassment of Jewish students in classrooms, hallways, schools yards, and walkouts since October 7, 2023.

  • What Do Anti-Jewish Hate, Anti-Muslim Hate Have in Common?

    Researchers scrutinize various facets of these types of bias, and note sometimes they both reside within the same person.

  • AI May Be to Blame for Our Failure to Make Contact with Alien Civilizations

    Could AI be the universe’s “great filter” – a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilizations? The great filter hypothesis is ultimately a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox: why, in a universe vast and ancient enough to host billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not detected any signs of alien civilizations. The hypothesis suggests there are insurmountable hurdles in the evolutionary timeline of civilizations that prevent them from developing into space-faring entities.

  • Seeing Behind the Mask

    There is a need for face recognition to be able to “see behind the mask” for security and safety. Researchers discusses the potential of new software which will allow facial recognition to work despite the mask you use.