• U.S. Government to Stop Buying Chinese-Made Drones

    In its latest move to address national security threats posed by Chinese-made drones, the U.S. federal government’s purchasing agency no longer will purchase drones from Chinese manufacturers. China currently dominates the drone-manufacturing market. One Chinese company, DJI, which is the world’s largest drone maker, has a 76.8 percent share of the U.S. market.

  • Chinese Presence in U.S. Academic Institutions

    When talking about the intensifying U.S.-China competition, most people think of trade battles, tariffs, human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, the militarization of the South China Sea, China’s growing nuclear arsenal, and similar issues. In many ways, however, U.S. universities and research institutions are a more immediate battleground for the U.S.-China rivalry.

  • Integrated Approaches to Disease Elimination

    The novel coronavirus pandemic has demanded an unprecedented, coordinated global response, which has culminated in increased global funding, and more importantly, increased attention to healthcare. But whilst efforts to produce and rollout effective diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines in record time are being widely acclaimed, there is a danger that this focus on COVID-19 threatens to derail decades of progress in the control and elimination of preventable infectious diseases, including malaria, polio and Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs).

  • Security Threats which Bind Us

    The Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) released a report last week which identifies ecological disruption as a major and underappreciated security threat and calls on the United States to reboot its national security architecture and doctrine to better respond to this evolving threat landscape.

  • What Hollywood Gets Wrong, and Right, about Asteroids

    In the 1998 movie “Armageddon,” an asteroid the width of Texas is about to hit Earth. The heroes who stop it in the nick of time are a group of orange-suited Americans, all men. Life isn’t always like the movies. Not that an asteroid couldn’t slam into Earth, mind you. Asteroids — mostly tiny ones — pass by our planet virtually every second. But the people charged with stopping the big ones aren’t reaching for their spacesuits with mere hours to spare.

  • Erratic Weather Slows Down the Economy

    If temperature varies strongly from day to day, the economy grows less. Through these seemingly small variations climate change may have strong effects on economic growth. In a new study, researchers  juxtapose observed daily temperature changes with economic data from more than 1,500 regions worldwide over 40 years – with startling results.

  • Swarming Drones Concept Flies Closer to Reality

    A swarm of twenty drones has recently completed the largest collaborative, military-focused evaluation of swarming uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the U.K. The exercise was the culmination of the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory’s (DSTL) “Many Drones Make Light Work” competition

  • Robot Seeks Out Chemical Agents

    Scientists have successfully tested a fully autonomous robot that will help defense and security personnel dealing with hazardous scenes. The development of the robot means that humans and machines can now share the burden of detecting and report dangerous chemicals over large areas.

  • Climate Change May Have Driven the Emergence of SARS-CoV-2

    Global greenhouse gas emissions over the last century have made southern China a hotspot for bat-borne coronaviruses, by driving growth of forest habitat favored by bats.

  • Pandemic Shows Need for Biological Readiness

    President Joe Biden’s inauguration comes during the worst stage of the deadliest biological event of our lifetimes. As bad as this pandemic is, imagine if instead it were caused by the deliberate release of a sophisticated biological weapon. About 2 percent of those infected have died of COVID-19, while a disease such as smallpox kills at a 30 percent rate. A bioengineered pathogen could be even more lethal. Our failed response to the pandemic in 2020 has exposed a gaping vulnerability to biological threats, ranging from natural outbreaks to deliberate biological weapons attacks.

  • Unifying U.S. Atmospheric Biology Research to Prevent Risks to National Security

    Global circulating winds can carry bacteria, fungal spores, viruses and pollen over long distances and across national borders, but the United States is ill-prepared to confront future disease outbreaks or food-supply threats caused by airborne organisms. In the United States, research and monitoring of airborne organisms is split between an array of federal agencies. The lack of coordination and information-sharing can effectively cripple the U.S. response to national security threats, such as pandemics.

  • Study: Rethink Immigration Policy for STEM Doctorates

    A streamlined process for awarding green cards to international STEM doctoral students graduating from U.S. universities could benefit American innovation and competitiveness, including leveling the field for startups eager to attract such highly skilled workers, according to a new study.

  • Why Projects to Adapt to Climate Change Backfire

    Many internationally funded projects aimed at combating the impacts of climate change can make things worse - by reinforcing, redistributing, or creating new sources of vulnerability in developing countries, according to a new study.

  • Role of Dams in Reducing Global Flood Risks under Climate Change

    Flood is amongst the costliest natural disasters. Globally, flood risk is projected to increase in the future, driven by climate change and population growth. The role of dams in flood mitigation, previously unaccounted for, was found to decrease by approximately 15 percent the number of people globally exposed to historical once-in-100-year floods, downstream of dams during the twenty-first century.

  • Aging Dams Pose Growing Threat

    By 2050, most people on Earth will live downstream of tens of thousands of large dams built in the twentieth century, many of them already operating at or beyond their design life. Increasingly expensive to maintain, experts foresee a trend to decommissioning dams.