• Aces-High Frontier: Space War in 2053

    There are good reasons why the best science and speculative fiction ranks high on the reading lists of many military scholars and leaders. Done well, speculative military fiction projects thoughtfully beyond the here and now, and renders real operational and strategic concepts in terms of plausible future technologies.

  • Lots of People Believe in Bigfoot and Other Pseudoscience Claims – This Course Examines Why

    In an effort to combat misinformation, a new course looks at some of the common scientific reasoning failures which pseudoscience exploits. These include hand-picking anecdotes to support a belief, developing a set of beliefs which explain every possible outcome, promoting irrelevant research, ignoring contradictory information, and believing in unsubstantiated conspiracies. The course particularly highlights motivated reasoning, that is, the tendency for people to process information in  a way that helps them confirm what they already want to believe.

  • Why Did So Many Buy COVID Misinformation? It Works Like Magic.

    Misinformation and disinformation about COVID and government-led health measures to combat the pandemic hampered efforts to form a unified national response to the disease. Public health officials, who struggled to convince doubters and skeptics, are still working through how and why it happened. Harvard Law panelists say both misinformation and magic exploit how brains process information.

  • Batteries Are the Battlefield

    The United States is one of many countries pursuing the clean energy revolution, and which have ramped up investment in electric vehicles manufacturing and renewable energy sources to power the shift away from fossil fuels. Christina Lu and Liam Scott write that this is an industry that has already been staked out by another power: China.

  • Half of U.S. Coastal Communities Underestimate Sea Level Risks

    Many communities in the United States underestimate how much sea level will rise in their area, according to a new study. In many cases, especially in Southern states, local policymakers rely on one average estimate of sea level rise for their area rather than accounting for more extreme scenarios.

  • Sea Change for Hull

    With a changing climate and rising sea levels putting cities at risk of flooding, it’s crucial for planners to increase their cities’ resilience. A new tool has been developed to help them – and it started with the throwing of a thousand virtual hexagons over Hull.

  • Discoveries in Phases of Uranium Oxide Advance Nuclear Nonproliferation

    The word “exotic” may not spark thoughts of uranium, but investigations of exotic phases of uranium are bringing new knowledge to the nuclear nonproliferation industry.

  • Science and Supercomputers Help Utilities Adapt to Climate Change

    Northern Illinois traditionally enjoys four predictable seasons. But climate is changing, with big repercussions for the people who live in the region and the power grid that supports them.

  • New Generator Rolls into Ocean Energy

    Tsunamis, hurricanes, and maritime weather are monitored using sensors and other devices on platforms in the ocean to help keep coastal communities safe—until the batteries on these platforms run out of juice. The nanogenerator harnesses the energy of the ocean to power sensors and more.

  • When Could a College or a University Hosting a Confucius Institute Receive DOD Funding?

    A new report proposes a set of criteria for the U.S. Department of Defense to consider in developing a waiver process that would potentially allow U.S. institutions of higher education to receive DOD funding while hosting a Confucius Institute.

  • How Chinese Companies Are Challenging National Security Decisions That Could Delay 5G Network Rollout

    In many countries, governments have decided to block Chinese companies from participating in building communication infrastructure in their countries because of national security concerns.  Chinese companies and investors often refuse to take such national security changes lying down. With varying degrees of success, firms have mounted a range of formal and informal challenges in recent years.

  • Supply-Chain Disruptions a Threat to Maintenance of Infrastructure, Critical Equipment

    The ability to deploy and maintain infrastructure and equipment is crucial to military operations and national security. But there is a problem: the ability to make and repair equipment in a wide range of operational environments is increasingly vulnerable to disruptions in global supply chains and to attacks.

  • Preparing to Be Prepared

    Even in a country like Japan, with advanced engineering, and policies in place to update safety codes, natural forces can overwhelm the built environment. Miho Mazereeuw, an architect of built and natural environments, looks for new ways to get people ready for natural disasters.

  • Forecasting Earthquakes That Get Off Schedule

    New model considers full history of a fault’s earthquakes to forecast next one. The new study by Northwestern University researchers will help earthquake scientists better deal with seismology’s most important problem: when to expect the next big earthquake on a fault.

  • New Web Tracking Technique is Bypassing Privacy Protections

    Advertisers and web trackers have been able to aggregate users’ information across all of the websites they visit for decades, primarily by placing third-party cookies in users’ browsers. Two years ago, several browsers that prioritize user privacy – and advertisers have responded by pioneering a new method for tracking users across the Web, known as user ID (or UID) smuggling.