• The Pandemic: Implications for Terrorist Interest in Biological Weapons

    What if the IS or al-Qaeda obtained and spread a highly contagious virus in a community or country that they sought to punish? With the pandemic highlighting weaknesses in response efforts, will these groups now seek to obtain infectious viruses to achieve these same deadly results?

  • Groundwater Depletion Causes California Farmland to Sink

    A new study simulates 65 years of land subsidence, or sinking, caused by groundwater depletion in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The results suggest significant sinking may continue for centuries after water levels stop declining but could slow within a few years if aquifers recover.

  • Secure Communication with Light Particles

    Quantum computers offer many novel possibilities, they also pose a threat to internet security since these supercomputers make common encryption methods vulnerable. Researchers have developed a new, tap-proof communication network.

  • Bolstering Security by Detecting Hidden Anomalies

    The ability to assess deviations from expected movement requires a deep characterization of normal activity across times of day, days of the week, weeks of the year as well as across different types of people. Current human mobility modeling techniques can provide high-level insight into human movement for the study of disease spread or population migration, but they don’t provide the complex, fine-grained modeling the Intelligence Community (IC) needs to identify more subtle anomalies with confidence.

  • Operational Protection of Water Infrastructure Against Cyber-Physical Threats

    As the water supply system becomes more digitalized, cyberthreats are increasing. It is time for an all-hazard risk management and mitigation system.

  • The Wall of Wind Can Blow Away Buildings at Category 5 Hurricane Strength to Help Engineers Design Safer Homes – but Even That Isn’t Powerful Enough

    When engineers built the Wall of Wind test facility 10 years ago at Florida International University, it was inspired by Hurricane Andrew, a monster of a storm that devastated South Florida in 1992. Tropical storms are ramping up in intensity as the climate changes and ocean and air temperatures rise. Designing homes and infrastructure to withstand future storms will require new test facilities that go well beyond today’s capabilities.

  • California Hydropower Could Be Cut in Half This Summer: Report

    A third year of drought spells less hydropower, more natural gas, and higher electricity prices. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, reported last week that as reservoir levels dip far below their historic averages, electricity generation from California’s hydroelectric dams could be cut in half this summer.

  • Mitigating Flood Disasters

    Engineers have proposed a flood control measure which recommends designing permeable pavements to specifically suit local rainfall and soil conditions and reduce flood impacts.

  • Making hardware and software Quantum-Safe

    Quantum computers are thought to have the potential to perform specialized calculations beyond the reach of any supercomputers in existence and will be able to break current public key cryptosystems used today.

  • Challenges to Tidal Flats Pose Risks to 41M Americans Living in Coastal Counties

    About 29 percent of the United States’ population live in coastline counties – more than 41 million are in Atlantic counties. This high population density poses a critical challenge to sustainable developments in coastal areas.

  • Reforming DHS’s Biodefense Operations and Governance

    Today’s biological threats show no signs of desisting any time soon. Naturally occurring outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics, and laboratory accidents pose a growing challenge – while the number of high-containment laboratories and amount of dangerous research continues to increase unabated. “DHS, as chief among those federal departments and agencies responsible for securing the homeland, must overcome its current state of fractionation and demonstrate to the rest of the government, country, and world that it is capable of coordinating and leading efforts in biodefense and other arenas,” Carrie Cordero and Asha M. George write.

  • S&T Hackathon: Thwarting Emerging Threats to Critical Infrastructure

    Threats against the U.S. critical infrastructure are not new—physical threats and natural disasters have challenged the U.S. critical infrastructure and their support systems time and time again. But the rapid development of new information and communication technologies, and their inevitable integration the into the U.S. critical infrastructure, bring with them the possibility of digital attacks and other new challenges that the United States must be ready to face.

  • Next-Generation Search & Rescue: Body Cameras, Live Streaming

    Typically, search and rescue teams in the wilderness use radio, in-person briefings, text messaging, drones and paper forms to communicate and coordinate their efforts. New digital tools have the potential to revolutionize wilderness search and rescue efforts.

  • Local, Temporary 5G Network to Help Fight Forest Fires

    When it comes to activities such as fighting forest fires, monitoring construction sites or providing multimedia services at sports and other mass events, a reliable, secure 5G campus network is often needed locally and temporarily to ensure maximum network coverage on the entire site.

  • Hydropower’s Future Is Clouded by Droughts, Floods and Climate Change – It’s Also Essential to the U.S. Electric Grid

    The United States has over 2,100 operational hydroelectric dams, with locations in nearly every state. They play essential roles in their regional power grids. But most were built in the past century under a different climate than they face today. As global temperatures rise and the climate continues to change, competition for water will increase, and the way hydropower supply is managed within regions and across the power grid in the U.S. will have to evolve.