• Securing the Food Pipeline from Cyberattacks

    Sensors detecting the amount of food that herds of cattle are eating. Machines taking thousands of photos of fruit per second to detect their defects and sort them by quality. Robots packing fruit and vegetables into bags and boxes for purchase at grocery stores: Researchers are protecting the food and agriculture sector.

  • Are We Running Out of Water? Water Security Threatened by Droughts and Heatwaves Worldwide

    Increased demand for water due to global population growth, coupled with the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, endangers our water security. Nonetheless, little is known about the relationship of water use by sectors and the occurrence of drought-heatwave events, particularly at the large scale.

  • Scorpius Images to Test Nuclear Stockpile Simulations

    One thousand feet below the ground, three national defense labs and a remote test site are building Scorpius — a machine as long as a football field — to create images of plutonium as it is compressed with high explosives, creating conditions that exist just prior to a nuclear explosion. The Sandia injector is key to validating plutonium pit performance.

  • Chi-Nu Experiment Concludes with Data to Support Nuclear Security, Energy Reactors

    The Chi-Nu project, a years-long experiment measuring the energy spectrum of neutrons emitted from neutron-induced fission, recently concluded the most detailed and extensive uncertainty analysis of the three major actinide elements — uranium-238, uranium-235 and plutonium-239.

  • AI-Driven Earthquake Forecasting Shows Promise in Trials

    A new attempt to predict earthquakes with the aid of artificial intelligence has raised hopes that the technology could one day be used to limit earthquakes’ impact on lives and economies. Researchers used AI algorithm to correctly predict 70% of earthquakes a week before they happened during a seven-month trial in China.

  • Climate Intervention Technologies May Create Winners and Losers in World Food Supply

    A technology being studied to curb climate change – one that could be put in place in one or two decades if work on the technology began now – would affect food productivity in parts of planet Earth in dramatically different ways, benefiting some areas, and adversely affecting others.

  • What’s Causing the Panama Canal Logjam

    Low water levels have, the result of prolonged drought conditions, led to a traffic jam at one of the world’s busiest maritime passages. The Panama Canal Authority has capped the number of ships that cross the canal each day, and has restricted their maximum weight and draft, or how deep below the waterline a ship sits. The bottleneck demonstrates how accelerating climate change is threatening global supply chains.

  • Computer Scientists Awarded $3M to Bolster Cybersecurity

    A $3 million grant from the DARPA, the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, aims to leverage reinforcement learning to make computer networks stronger, dynamic and more secure.

  • Using Petroleum Reservoirs to Store Carbon

    Oil and gas produced from reservoirs are traditionally thought of as sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In recent years, scientists in government and industry have been looking more at oil and gas reservoirs as places to store the very carbon that was previously taken out of the reservoirs. Injecting carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs also increases oil production in areas that have already produced a lot of oil. 

  • NSF Backs Processor Design, Chip Security Research

    Rice University computer scientists have won two grants from the National Science Foundation to explore new information processing technologies and applications that combine seamlessly co-designed hardware and software to allow for more effective and efficient data stream analysis using pattern matching.

  • AI Risks to the Financial Sector

    In a world where AI algorithms can already analyze real-time financial information and make high-stakes trading decisions with little or no human oversight, our financial regulations are failing to keep up. A professor of computer science and engineering identifies new concerns that recent AI advances pose for financial markets.

  • NSF invests $35M in future manufacturing

    Manufacturing is a linchpin of the U.S. economy, bolstering national security, economic growth, and American employment. The National Science Foundation (NSF) makes targeted investments in the future of manufacturing research and helps grow the manufacturing workforce.

  • AI Disinformation Is a Threat to Elections − Learning to Spot Russian, Chinese and Iranian Meddling in Other Countries Can Help the U.S. Prepare for 2024

    Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence. Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential election. But there is a new element: generative AI and large language models. These have the ability to quickly and easily produce endless reams of text on any topic in any tone from any perspective, thus making generative AI and large language models a tool uniquely suited to internet-era propaganda. The sooner we know what to expect, the better we can deal with what comes.

  • U.S.-China “Tech War”: AI Sparks First Battle in Middle East

    The U.S. has restricted exports of some computer chips to the Middle East, to stop AI-enabling chips from getting to China. But there’s no information on which countries are affected, or how chips would get to China. What is becoming clear is that AI could well become a new source of friction between democratic and autocratic states.

  • It's Easier to Get Valuable Metals from Battery Waste If You “Flash” It

    Demand for valuable metals needed in batteries is poised to grow over the coming decades in step with the growth of clean energy technologies, and the best place to source them may be by recycling spent batteries.