• States Fast-Track Wind, Solar Permits and Contracts to Beat Trump’s Deadline

    Since taking office, the Trump administration has pursued a number of policies aimed at dismantling support for renewable energy, particularly targeting wind and solar power, which President Trump described as a “scam.” Federal tax credits have brought project costs down 30-50%, advocates say.

  • HydroBoost: Increasing Hydropower Revenue with Realistic Forecasting

    Optimizing the revenue and power storage capabilities of hydropower plants is challenging because water flow varies with seasons and weather conditions.To help hydropower operators,researchers developed HydroBoost, an optimization solver.

  • U.S. Mines Are Literally Throwing Away Critical Minerals

    The United States is home to dozens of active mines. Some extract copper, while others dig for iron. Whatever the resource, however, it usually makes up a small fraction of the rock pulled from the ground. There’s enough lithium in one year of U.S. mine waste to power 10 million electric vehicles.

  • Microsoft Failed to Disclose Key Details About Use of China-Based Engineers in U.S. Defense Work, Record Shows

    The tech giant is required to regularly provide U.S. officials with its plan for keeping government data safe from hacking. Yet a copy of Microsoft’s security plan obtained by ProPublica makes no reference to the company’s China-based operations.

  • President Trump’s War on “Woke AI” Is a Civil Liberties Nightmare

    The White House’s recently-unveiled “AI Action Plan” wages war on so-called “woke AI”—including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration’s views on climate change, gender, and other issues. The plan would force developers to roll back efforts to reduce biases—making the models much less accurate, and far more likely to cause harm, especially in the hands of the government.

  • Bookshelf: Smartphones Shape War in Hyperconnected World

    The smartphone is helping to shape the conduct and representation of contemporary war. A new book argues that as an operative device, the smartphone is now “being used as a central weapon of war.”

  • The True Cost of Abandoning Science

    “We now face a choice: to remain at the vanguard of scientific inquiry through sound investment, or to cede our leadership and watch others answer the big questions that have confounded humanity for millennia —and reap the rewards.”

  • Nuclear Waste Could Be a Source of Fuel in Future Reactors

    In theory, nuclear fusion —a process that fuses atoms together, releasing heat to turn generators —could provide vast energy supplies with minimal emissions. But nuclear fusion is an expensive prospect because one of its main fuels is a rare version of hydrogen called tritium. Now, researchers are developing new systems to use nuclear waste to make tritium.

  • Foundation for U.S. Breakthroughs Feels Shakier to Researchers

    With each dollar of its grants, the National Institutes of Health —the world’s largest funder of biomedical research —generates, on average, $2.56 worth of economic activity across all 50 states. NIH grants also support more than 400,000 U.S. jobs, and have been a central force in establishing the country’s dominance in medical research. Waves of funding cuts and grant terminations under the second Trump administration are a threat to the U.S. status as driver of scientific progress, and to the nation’s economy.

  • New Approach Detects Adversarial Attacks in Multimodal AI Systems

    New vulnerabilities have emerged with the rapid advancement and adoption of multimodal foundational AI models, significantly expanding the potential for cybersecurity attacks. Topological signatures key to revealing attacks, identifying origins of threats.

  • Groundwater Is Drying Out, Heating Up, and Causing Sea Level Rise

    Overuse has created zones of “mega-drying” around the world —and caused more sea level rise than Greenland’s ice sheet.

  • How Poisoned Data Can Trick AI − and How to Stop It

    The quality of the information that the AI offers depends on the quality of the data it learns from If someone tries to interfere with those systems by tampering with their training data –either the initial data used to build the system or data the system collects as it’s operating to improve –trouble could ensue.

  • First-of-its-Kind Industrial System Security Course

    The University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UA Little Rock) is giving students the tools to protect the systems that power modern life through a new course focused on industrial system security.

  • Climate Models Reveal How Human Activity May Be Locking the Southwest into Permanent Drought

    A new wave of climate research is sounding a stark warning: Human activity may be driving drought more intensely –and more directly –than previously understood. One example: The southwestern United States has been in a historic megadrought for much of the past two decades, with its reservoirs including lakes Mead and Powell dipping to record lows and legal disputes erupting over rights to use water from the Colorado Rive.

  • Filtered Data Stops Openly Available AI Models from Performing Dangerous Tasks

    Researchers have reported a major advance in safeguarding open-weight language models. By filtering out potentially harmful knowledge during training, the researchers were able to build models that resist subsequent malicious updates – especially valuable in sensitive domains such as biothreat research.