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How Do the Militaries of Russia and Ukraine Stack Up?
Russia holds a sizable advantage over Ukraine on troop numbers and weaponry yet the two sides have fought to a standstill. Russia this spring has ramped up attacks on civilian targets while resisting U.S. ceasefire calls.
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Our Online World Relies on Encryption. What Happens If It Fails?
Quantum computers will make traditional data encryption techniques obsolete; BU researchers have turned to physics to come up with better defenses.
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Critical Minerals Don’t Belong in Landfills – Microwave Tech Offers a Cleaner Way to Reclaim Them from E-waste
E-waste recycling focuses on retrieving steel, copper, aluminum, but ignores tiny specks of critical materials. Once technology becomes available to recover these tiny but valuable specks of critical materials quickly and affordably, the U.S. can transform domestic recycling and take a big step toward solving its shortage of critical materials.
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MIT Announces the Initiative for New Manufacturing
The Institute-wide effort aims to bolster industry and create jobs by driving innovation across vital manufacturing sectors.
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Virtual Models Paving the Way for Advanced Nuclear Reactors
Computer models predict how reactors will behave, helping operators make decisions in real time. The digital twin technology using graph-neural networks may boost nuclear reactor efficiency and reliability.
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10-story Steel-Framed Building to be Put to the Test on UC San Diego Earthquake Simulator
A10-story cold-formed steel-framed building will soon be put to the test on an earthquake simulator at the University of California San Diego to see how well it can withstand earthquakes.
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Shots to the Dome—Why We Can’t Model US Missile Defense on Israel’s “Iron Dome”
Starting an arms race where the costs are stacked against you at a time when debt-to-GDP is approaching an all-time high seems reckless. All in all, the idea behind Golden Dome is still quite undercooked.
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Autonomous Weapon Systems: No Human-in-the-Loop Required, and Other Myths Dispelled
“The United States has a strong policy on autonomy in weapon systems that simultaneously enables their development and deployment and ensures they could be used in an effective manner, meaning the systems work as intended, with the same minimal risk of accidents or errors that all weapon systems have,” Michael Horowitz writes.
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A Brief History of Federal Funding for Basic Science
Biomedical science in the United States is at a crossroads. For 75 years, the federal government has partnered with academic institutions, fueling discoveries that have transformed medicine and saved lives. Recent moves by the Trump administration — including funding cuts and proposed changes to how research support is allocated — now threaten this legacy.
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Bookshelf: Preserving the U.S. Technological Republic
The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation. But our present advantage cannot be taken for granted.
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Golden Dome: An Aerospace Engineer Explains the Proposed Nationwide Missile Defense System
Similar to Iron Dome, Golden Dome will consist of sensors and interceptor missiles but will be deployed over a much wider geographical region and for defense against a broader variety of threats in comparison with Iron Dome.
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Golden Dome: What Trump Should Learn from Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ Missile Defense System Plan
Golden Dome is reportedly partly inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome system that protects the country from missile attacks, but critics say that it’s much harder to design a defense system to protect a land mass the size of the United States. This is particularly the case in an era characterized by the threat from hypersonic missiles, as well as attacks from space.
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USGS to Fund States’ Efforts to Find Critical Minerals in Mine Waste
The U.S. Geological Survey invited states to compete for $5 million in cooperative agreements to find critical minerals needed to drive the U.S. economy in the materials left over from mining at active and legacy sites.
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Helping the Grid Keep Pace with a Power-Hungry Economy
After remaining nearly flat for almost two decades, America’s demand for electricity is growing, driven by data centers for AI, electric vehicles, production of electrofuels, and other factors. This rising demand is one of many reasons the U.S. needs to dramatically ramp up the grid’s capacity to move electricity.
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How to Solve a Bottleneck for CO2 Capture and Conversion
Today’s carbon capture systems suffer a tradeoff between efficient capture and release, but a new approach developed at MIT can boost overall efficiency.
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The long view
Are We Ready for a ‘DeepSeek for Bioweapons’?
Anthropic’s Claude 4 is a warning sign: AI that can help build bioweapons is coming, and could be widely available soon. Steven Adler writes that we need to be prepared for the consequences: “like a freely downloadable ‘DeepSeek for bioweapons,’ available across the internet, loadable to the computer of any amateur scientist who wishes to cause mass harm. With Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 having finally triggered this level of safety risk, the clock is now ticking.”
A Brief History of Federal Funding for Basic Science
Biomedical science in the United States is at a crossroads. For 75 years, the federal government has partnered with academic institutions, fueling discoveries that have transformed medicine and saved lives. Recent moves by the Trump administration — including funding cuts and proposed changes to how research support is allocated — now threaten this legacy.
Bookshelf: Preserving the U.S. Technological Republic
The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation. But our present advantage cannot be taken for granted.
Autonomous Weapon Systems: No Human-in-the-Loop Required, and Other Myths Dispelled
“The United States has a strong policy on autonomy in weapon systems that simultaneously enables their development and deployment and ensures they could be used in an effective manner, meaning the systems work as intended, with the same minimal risk of accidents or errors that all weapon systems have,” Michael Horowitz writes.
Ukraine Drone Strikes on Russian Airbase Reveal Any Country Is Vulnerable to the Same Kind of Attack
Air defense systems are built on the assumption that threats come from above and from beyond national borders. But Ukraine’s coordinated drone strike on 1 June on five airbases deep inside Russian territory exposed what happens when states are attacked from below and from within. In low-level airspace, visibility drops, responsibility fragments, and detection tools lose their edge. Drones arrive unannounced, response times lag, coordination breaks.
Shots to the Dome—Why We Can’t Model US Missile Defense on Israel’s “Iron Dome”
Starting an arms race where the costs are stacked against you at a time when debt-to-GDP is approaching an all-time high seems reckless. All in all, the idea behind Golden Dome is still quite undercooked.