• Planning for an Uncertain Future: What Climate-Related Conflict Could Mean for U.S. Central Command

    The Middle East and Central Asia are projected to become hotter and drier, with reduced access to fresh water, resulting from climate change. These changes could lead to greater conflict in U.S. Central Command’s (CENTCOM) area of responsibility.

  • Artificial Intelligence Systems Excel at Imitation, but Not Innovation

    Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation. While children and adults alike can solve problems by finding novel uses for everyday objects, AI systems often lack the ability to view tools in a new way.

  • “Energy Droughts” in Wind and Solar Can Last Nearly a Week, Research Shows

    Understanding the risk of compound energy droughts—times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow—will help grid planners understand where energy storage is needed most.

  • Taking Illinois’ Center for Digital Agriculture into the Future

    The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has a new executive director, John Reid, who plans to support CDA’s growth across all dimensions of use-inspired research, translation of research into practice, and education and workforce development.

  • Earth Had Is Warmest November on Record

    November 2023 was the warmest November in NOAA’s 174-year global climate record, and 2023 still on track to be the globe’s warmest year recorded.

  • Why Federal Efforts to Protect Schools from Cybersecurity Threats Fall Short

    In August 2023, the White House announced a plan to bolster cybersecurity in K-12 schools – and with good reason. Between 2018 and mid-September 2023, there were 386 recorded cyberattacks in the U.S. education sector and cost those schools $35.1 billion. K-12 schools were the primary target. While the steps taken by the White House are positive, as someone who teaches and conducts research about cybersecurity, I don’t believe the proposed measures are enough to protect schools from cyberthreats.

  • ChatGPT Could Help First Responders During Natural Disasters

    A little over a year since its launch, ChatGPT’s abilities are well known. The machine learning model can write a decent college-level essay and hold a conversation in an almost human-like way. But could its language skills also help first responders find those in distress during a natural disaster?

  • Innovative Long-Duration Energy Storage Project

    Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories have been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for a project to validate CMBlu Energy’s battery technology for microgrid resilience and electric vehicle charging. U.S. Department of Energy selects national labs to validate the company’s battery technology for microgrid resilience and electric vehicle charging.

  • Costs of the Climate Crisis: An Insurance Umbrella for Nations at Risk

    International study in the run-up to COP28: Public-private partnerships may help protect developing countries from the financial consequences of climate change.

  • AI Networks Are More Vulnerable to Malicious Attacks Than Previously Thought

    Artificial intelligence tools hold promise for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to the interpretation of medical images. However, a new study finds these AI tools are more vulnerable than previously thought to targeted attacks that effectively force AI systems to make bad decisions.

  • Smart Microgrids Can Restore Power More Efficiently and Reliably in an Outage

    It’s a story that’s become all too familiar — high winds knock out a power line, and a community can go without power for hours to days, an inconvenience at best and a dangerous situation at worst. Engineers developed an AI model that optimizes the use of renewables and other energy sources to restore power when a main utility fails.

  • Seaworthy Solution Yields Green Energy, Fresh Water

    Engineers have refined a model that not only cultivates green energy, but also desalinates ocean water for large, drought-stricken coastal populations.By pumping seawater to a mountaintop reservoir and then employing gravity to send the salty water down to a co-located hydropower plant and a reverse osmosis desalination facility, science can satisfy the energy and hydration needs of coastal cities with one system.

  • Researchers Fabricate Commercial Grade Uranium Dioxide HALEU Fuel

    As the world clamors for carbon-free power, U.S. nuclear reactor developers have responded with several advanced reactor designs. Nuclear energy from light water reactors already ranks among the safest forms of energy production, and most advanced reactors will use safety systems that rely on the laws of physics to virtually eliminate the possibility of a serious accident.

  • National Opportunities to Remove Carbon Dioxide at the Gigaton Scale

    Researchers have completed a first-of-its-kind high-resolution assessment of carbon dioxide (CO2) removal (CDR) in the United States. The report concludes that with today’s technologies, removing 1 billion metric tons of CO2 per year will annually cost roughly $130 billion in 2050, or about 0.5% of current GDP.

  • New Insights on Community Resilience and Adaptation

    A major weather event such as a hurricane or wildfire can have lasting, visible impacts on communities, but the longer-term, compounding effects of a changing climate can be harder to see. There are  ways that communities can adapt and become more resilient as the climate changes.