• The U.S. Is Worried about Its Critical Minerals Supply Chains – Essential for Electric Vehicles, Wind Power and the Nation’s Defense

    When U.S. companies build military weapons systems, electric vehicle batteries, satellites and wind turbines, they rely heavily on a few dozen “critical minerals” – many of which are mined and refined almost entirely by other countries. Building a single F-35A fighter jet, for example, requires at least 920 pounds of rare earth elements that come primarily from China. That level of dependence on imports worries the U.S. government.

  • The Future of Lifesaving Firefighting Technology

    A groundbreaking tracking and location technology will soon allow agencies to pinpoint their firefighters to within centimeters, helping to navigate them quickly and safely out of potentially disorienting emergency scenarios.

  • Revolutionary Nuclear Heating Plant

    A team of scientists has come up with a radical solution to heat cities using spent nuclear rods, which they say is cost-effective and greener than natural gas. As the EU moves away from coal, many are interested.

  • Monitoring Current and Future Biological Threats

    DHS S&T has awarded $199,648 to Mesur.io Inc., for analysis and reporting of outbreak-related data. The Mesur.io project proposes to adapt their Earthstream Platform to provide DHS and NBIC with data that tracks metrics related to an outbreak or emergence to predict various risks of a biological threat.

  • The U.S. Needs a Macrogrid to Move Electricity from Areas that Make It to Areas that Need It

    Many kinds of extreme events can disrupt electricity service, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, extreme heat, extreme cold and extended droughts. Major disasters can leave thousands of people in the dark. During such events, unaffected regions may have power to spare. For example, during the February blackouts in Texas, utilities were generating electricity from hydropower in the Pacific Northwest, natural gas in the Northeast, wind on the northern Plains and solar power in the Southwest. Today it’s not possible to move electricity seamlessly from one end of the U.S. to the other.

  • Biohazard: A Look at China’s Biological Capabilities and the Recent Coronavirus Outbreak

    When people think about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they tend to think of things that go “boom.” The bigger the weapon, the bigger the boom, and the worse the impact. However, not all weapons need a big boom to be effective. Every day, millions of people are affected by a weapon that has the potential to do far more damage than a nuclear bomb, a weapon we cannot see, a weapon we call germs.

  • Pathogens Have the World’s Attention

    The novel coronavirus has demonstrated just how devastating a transmissible pathogen can be—and just how difficult to contain. Nathan Levine and Chris Li write that “the sobering truth is that, as deadly diseases go, the world got lucky. The global case fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 2 percent. One need only compare this to SARS (10 percent), smallpox (30 percent), pulmonary anthrax (80 percent), or Ebola (90 percent) to consider that the coronavirus could easily have been much, much worse.”

  • Combatting Terrorism with Environmental DNA

    Forensic science experts are refining an innovative counter-terrorism technique that checks for environmental DNA in the dust on clothing, baggage, shoes or even a passport. The technique traces the source of dust on suspect articles to match a soil profile of a specific area or overseas country.

  • Intentional Youth Firearm Injuries Linked to Sociodemographic Factors

    Firearm injuries are a leading and preventable cause of injury and death among youth - responsible for an estimated 5,000 deaths and 22,000 non-fatal injury hospital visits each year in American kids. The researchers  identified distinct risk profiles for individuals aged 21 and younger, who arrived at emergency departments with firearm injuries over an 8-year period.

  • One in Five Colorado High School Students Has Access to Firearms

    Twenty percent of high school students in Colorado have easy access to a handgun, according to a new study. “Our findings highlight that it is relatively easy to access a handgun in Colorado for high school students. This finding, combined with the high prevalence of feeling sad or depressed and suicide attempts, is concerning for the safety of adolescents,” said the lead author of the study.

  • The Promise of Forecasting Meteotsunamis

    Scientists have, for the first time, documented meteotsunami in the Great Lakes caused by an atmospheric inertia-gravity wave. An atmospheric inertia-gravity wave is a wave of air that can run from 6 to 60 miles long that is created when a mass of stable air is displaced by an air mass with significantly different pressure. This sets in motion a wave of air with rising and falling pressure that can influence the water below, as it synchronizes with water movement on the lake’s surface like two singers harmonizing.

  • Climate Change Has Cost 7 years of Ag Productivity Growth

    Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a Cornell-led study shows that global farming productivity is 21 percent lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.

  • An AI-Based Counter-Disinformation Framework

    There are different roles that AI can play in counter-disinformation efforts, but the current shortfalls of AI-based counter-disinformation tools must be addressed first. Such an effort faces technical, governance, and regulatory barriers, but there are ways these obstacles could be effectively addressed to allow AI-based solutions to play a bigger role in countering disinformation.

  • Decoding the “Black Box” of AI to Tackle National Security Concerns

    When the discussion involves the detection of nuclear explosions or the movement of materials that endanger the nation’s security, scientists, policy makers, and others demand to know the basis of AI-based insights. Explainable AI—understanding and explaining the reasoning behind AI decisions—is a growing priority for national security specialists.

  • New Initiative Aims to Ensure 5G Networks Are Reliable, Secure

    The transition to 5G will affect every device connected to the internet. Later this year, a team of Stanford researchers will demonstrate how a tight formation of computer-controlled drones can be managed with precision even when the 5G network controlling it is under continual cyberattack. The demo’s ultimate success or failure will depend on the ability of an experimental network control technology to detect the hacks and defeat them within a second to safeguard the navigation systems.