• Climate Change Triggers Migration

    Environmental hazards affect populations worldwide and can drive migration under specific conditions, especially in middle-income and agricultural countries. According to a new study, changes in temperature levels, increased rainfall variability, and rapid-onset disasters such as tropical storms play an important role in this regard.

  • Wildfire in Northern California's Coastal Ranges on the Rise Since 1984

    High-severity wildfires in northern coastal California have been increasing by about 10 percent per decade since 1984, according to a new study. From Berryessa to Klamath Mountains, High-Severity Burns Quadrupled During Warm Drought.

  • Does Experiencing Wildfires Create Political Consensus on Resilience Measures?

    As of last weekend [12-13 September], 97 large fires have burned 4.7 million acres across the American West, causing widespread evacuations in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Idaho and Utah.  The smoke from these summer wildfires has spread very widely over the region, curtailing outdoor activity and sending many to the hospitals with respiratory ailments, heat attacks and strokes.  Will this move us any closer to achieving a consensus on the topic of dealing with climate change?

  • What Is a Tipping Point, and Why Should I Care?

    Big or small, certain shifts — spurred by disruptions — indicate that in some way a point between the way things were in the past and the way they’ll be in the future has been met and passed. Our ability to understand and act thoughtfully around this single concept could determine the fate of life on Earth.

  • Radiation Detection System to Protect Major U.S. Metropolitan Region

    An exercise last December at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was the culmination of a five-year effort to develop and deploy an automated, high-performance, networked radiation detection capability for counterterrorism and continuous city-to-region scale radiological and nuclear threat monitoring.

  • Making Highways, Tunnels, and Bridges More Resilient to Extreme Events

    The EU-funded RESIST project aims to provide a methodology as well as tools for risk analysis and management for critical highway structures (in the case of bridges and tunnels) that will be applicable to all extreme natural and man-made events, or cyber-attacks to the associated information systems. Its goal is to increase the resilience of seamless transport operation and protect the users and operators of the European transport infrastructure by providing them optimal information.

  • Up to 15 Inches of Sea-Level Rise from Ice Sheets by 2100

    A collaborative effort of more than three dozen research institutions from around the world has helped to create the most accurate prediction of how melting ice in Antarctica and Greenland will contribute to global sea-level rise.   

  • The Phish Scale: NIST’s New Tool Lets IT Staff See Why Users Click on Fraudulent Emails

    Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new tool called the Phish Scale that could help organizations better train their employees to avoid a particularly dangerous form of cyberattack known as phishing.

  • The Genetic Engineering Genie Is Out of the Bottle

    Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Scientists have now conclusively proved that the virus was not designed in a lab, but Vivek Wadhwa writes that if “genetic engineering wasn’t behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world’s dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles.”

  • Heritable Genome Editing Not Yet Ready to Be Tried Safely and Effectively in Humans

    Human embryos whose genomes have been edited should not be used to create a pregnancy until it is established that precise genomic changes can be made reliably without introducing undesired changes — a criterion that has not yet been met by any genome editing technology, says a new scientific report.

  • Climate Change Making Western Wildfires in U.S. Worse

    Wildfires have burned a record-breaking 1.25 million hectares in California as of Saturday. Washington state is enduring its second-largest area burned. A half-million people are under a fire evacuation warning or order in Oregon, one-tenth of the state’s population. The devastation is not unexpected. Climate experts have been sounding the alarm for a long time. Wildfires need dry plants to burn, and climate change is helping increase the supply.

  • Global Fire Outlook Not Good News, but Mitigation Is Possible

    Wildfire is a natural process necessary to many ecosystems. But wildfires are getting worse and more damaging, and it is our fault, according to new research. The global economic and environmental damage caused by wildfire will only increase because of human-caused climate change, but we are also able to save ourselves, the researchers said.

  • Security Solution Traps Cybercriminals in a Virtual Network

    Researchers are developing a new cyber-security deception solution that uses artificial intelligence to lure hackers away and prevent breaches of network systems. The “Lupovis” solution under development by the team at the University of Strathclyde’s Center for Intelligent and Dynamic Communications makes the hunter become the hunted.

  • Climate Engineering: Modelling Projections Oversimplify Risks

    Climate change is gaining prominence as a political and public priority. But many ambitious climate action plans foresee the use of climate engineering technologies whose risks are insufficiently understood. Researchers warn that over-optimistic expectations of climate engineering may reinforce the inertia with which industry and politics have been addressing decarbonization. In order to forestall this trend, they recommend more stakeholder input and clearer communication of the premises and limitations of model results.

  • U.S. Revokes Visas of 1,000 Chinese Students Considered “High Risk”

    The U.S. says it has revoked the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese citizens considered “high risk” to U.S. security because of alleged ties with the Chinese military. The Trump administration has charged that Chinese students have come to the United States to steal intellectual property to advance China’s economic and military sectors.