• An HSNW conversation with Harold Wolpert, CEO of Avalias

    Avalias’s solutions allow an organization to approximate the experience of a disaster, and to help the personnel charged with defense and mitigation to perfect and rehearse their responses to disaster; Harold Wolpert, CEO of Avalias: “Our technology is taken for granted. That’s because it can be”

  • Officials ponder the lessons of Columbine

    Next week will mark ten years to the Columbine High shooting; hundreds of millions have been invested in school security, but money is drying up, and emphasis on campus security is weakening; some say say simpler, cheaper measure would be best in any event

  • DHS adds $100 million to emergency food bank

    DHS secretary Napolitano announces $100 million in stimulus package funds for Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP); EFSP, created twenty-six years ago, has so far distributed more than $3.4 billion in federal funds for food and shelter

  • Seeing through concrete, clearly

    Insurgents and terrorists fight from within civilian structures, making it difficult for soldiers and first responders to respond without injuring many civilians; DARPA wants a solution which would allow soldiers to look through concrete walls and give them a detailed picture of a building’s interior — right down to the fixtures

  • Smart bandage tells doctors about state of wound healing

    Dutch researchers develop a smart bandage which updates doctors about the wound healing process; bandage made of printed electronic sensors; the researchers’ next goal: add an antenna to transmit information about the patient’s health remotely to the attending physician

  • NYPD wants to expand anti-terror program to midtown

    NYPD wants to duplicate in midtown the measures under way near Ground Zero; these measures will allow allow police to do everything they do downtown — scan license plates, monitor surveillance video cameras, and use radiation and bioterrorism detectors — between 34th and 59th streets, from river to river

  • Soldiers' helmets serve as sniper location system

    Commodore researchers develop a networked helmet that help soldiers and first responders fighting in a hazardous urban environment pin-point and display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of weapons they are firing

  • New device locates people in danger

    University of Pittsburgh researchers develop a tracking device that can pinpoint within a few feet the locations of people inside burning buildings or other structures where there is an emergency

  • Better bullet-proof vests with advanced fiber weaves

    Manchester University researchers say that bullet-proof vests used to protect the lives of police officers could be further improved with advanced fiber weaves

  • Disease maps may help turn Zimbabwe's health crisis around

    The government of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe destroyed the country’s health care system and shut down water treatment facilities; the result has been an uncontrolled cholera outbreak; international aid organizations launch a Web site to help the poor people of Zimbabwe find disease-related information — because their government not only would do nothing to curb the epidemic, it also conceals crucial information from the citizenry

  • U.K. to train workers in counter-terrorism

    Home Office says 60,000 U.K. workers will be trained in counterterrorism so they can assist in responding to terror incidents; the trained workers will augment the existing force of 3,000 dedicated counterterrorism police officers

  • North Dakota EMS employees use disaster money for booze

    Nearly $200,000 of the roughly $810,000 the Bismarck, North Dakota-based EMS group received between 2004 and last year to help produce a plan to fight bioterrorism and other mass disasters was used on “unallowable or questionable” items

  • U.K. looking for a single search and rescue helicopter fleet

    The U.K. Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Transportation are planning to acquire one helicopter for both military and domestic search and rescue missions; the single SAR fleet of aircraft will succeed the existing service in 2012

  • Cost of bioterror false alarms, anthrax hoaxes rises

    The U.S. government has spent more than $50 billion since the 2001 anthrax attacks to beef up U.S. defenses against biological attacks; there has not been another attack so far, but the cost of hoaxes and false alarms is rising steeply

  • Deadly avian flu virus found in wild duck in Germany

    German authorities discovered the virus in a wild duck shot during a hunt near Starnberg, in Bavaria; this is the first case of a virus found in a wild bird for over a year