• Presidents often reverse U.S. foreign policy — how Trump handles setbacks is what matters most now

    President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal is hardly Trump’s first foreign policy turnaround. But is Trump really such an outlier? As a scholar of American foreign policy, I know that many American presidents have reoriented international relations. Some of those policies succeeded. Many faced opposition. Ultimately, though, my research shows that what matters more to U.S. national security is how those presidents responded when their foreign policy shifts failed.

  • Improving fingerprinting technology

    Fingerprint capture technology has advanced to the point where high-quality rolled prints soon might be obtained without the manual assistance of a trained device operator. These advancements could help law enforcement collect information-rich prints more rapidly and economically.

  • Former Israeli national security advisor: If Iran attacks Israel again, “there will be consequences”

    Following a weekend during which Israeli officials warned that Iran was preparing to use proxies to attack northern Israel in retaliation for an airstrike against an Iranian airbase in Syria, a former Israeli national security advisor asserted that for any Iranian attack “there will be consequences.”

  • Assad will be killed, his regime toppled if Iran attacks from Syria: Israeli official

    An Israeli government minister on Monday threatened that Israel could kill Syrian President Bashar Assad if his government does not prevent Iranian forces from launching attacks against Israel from Syrian territory. “If Assad continues to let the Iranians operate from Syrian soil, he should know that he signed his own death warrant and that it will be his end. We will topple his regime,” Yuval Steinitz, a member of the security cabinet and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said.

  • Keeping Big Data safe

    NIST has announced the Unlinkable Data Challenge, created to help the public safety community conduct research using data gathered with personal digital devices and taken from large databases such as driver’s license and health care records. Much of this data includes personal information that can be used to identify its source. Exposing this data risks those individuals’ privacy, but the inability to share it impedes research in many fields, including thwarting crime, fighting fires and slowing the spread of epidemics.

  • Using sweat to distinguish individuals at crime scene

    An average square inch of skin contains 650 sweat glands. That means our bodies leave small amounts of sweat on everything we touch—whether we’re making a phone call, eating supper or committing a crime. Researchers believe investigators can use these tiny, often invisible skin secretions to their advantage.

  • Stricter gun control could prevent violent men from killing their partners and themselves

    Researchers draw on ten years of data on intimate partner homicide to determine the role guns play in murder-suicides. The researchers say that men who use guns to kill their partner are also likely to commit suicide. Those planning to commit suicide are not deterred by severe penalties, and therefore the most successful way of preventing such homicides is to restrict gun access to batterers.

  • Improving K-9 training

    Additive manufacturing (AM) has gone to the dogs, thanks to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) new approach to K-9 training materials. The process prints 3D objects that contain trace amounts of nonreactive explosives, resulting in several advantages for K-9s and their handlers.

  • IAEA saw no “credible evidence” Iran was working on nuclear weapon after 2009

    In December 2015, following a series of inspections, the IAEA issued a report saying that the agency had “no credible” evidence Iran was working on developing a nuclear “explosive device” after 2009 and that the UN’s nuclear watchdog considered the issue “closed.” The IAEA said today (1 May) that the agency stands by those conclusions. The IAEA’s statement ccame after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on 30 April that Israel had documents that showed new “proof” of an Iranian nuclear-weapons plan that could be activated at any time.

  • Attacks on healthcare in Syria are likely undercounted

    Attacks on health facilities and health workers in Syria are likely more common than previously reported, and local data collectors can help researchers more accurately to measure the extent and frequency of these attacks, according to a new study. The researchers found that in 2016 alone, there were more than 200 attacks on healthcare-related targets in four northern governorates of Syria, with 176 of the attacks targeting hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

  • Truly autonomous systems to learn “on the fly”

    Almost all artificial intelligence, or AI, technology is reliant on the availability of massive amounts of data, but engineers are now trying to develop machines that can learn “on the fly” in situations where there is little data to inform them. The engineers hope their efforts will assist the Department of Defense in the development of truly autonomous systems that can not only operate in challenging environments but also survive disruptions or recognize when they are fatal.

  • How are drones changing warfare, threatening security?

    The Trump administration recently announced a new policy that could vastly expand the sale of armed aerial drones, a specialty of Professor Nicholas Grossman, the author of the new book Drones and Terrorism: Asymmetric Warfare and the Threat to Global Security. “Most people focus on governments deploying drones, but terrorists, insurgents and other nonstate actors are using them as well,” he said. “The growing commercial drone market also creates concerns that terrorists will deploy them in the United States and other developed countries.”

  • Seismic early warning could save lives in Nepal’s next Big One

    Just before noon on 25 April 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that maxed out the seismic intensity scale shook the entire nation of Nepal. Originating about 100 km northwest of the capital city of Kathmandu, this earthquake along with a magnitude 7.1 aftershock on 12 May killed nearly 9,000 people and injured nearly 22,000 more while damaging or destroying more than 600,000 structures. Scientists say that if sensors had been near the epicenter of the 2015 earthquake, they could have detected it up to 80 seconds before it reached Kathmandu. Even factoring in the time it would take to corroborate the signal with other sensors and transmit a warning to everyone’s cell phones—which are just as abundant in Nepal as they are in America—people could have gotten more than a minute warning.

  • Israeli air strike destroys Iranian missile storage facilities in Syria

    An overnight Israeli air strike destroyed more than 200 Iranian mid-range missiles which Iran stored at Syrian military bases near Hama. These missiles were more accurate, and were capable of carrying a bigger warhead, than other missiles available to Hezbollah and the Syrian military. The attack killed 26 military personnel, including 18 Iranian officers. Bashar-al-Assad’s victory in the civil war in Syria has opened the door for Iran, his main ally, to try and turn Syria into an Iranian forward military base against Israel.

  • Stolen guns not an important source of guns used in crimes

    Only about 1 percent of all gun transactions in the United States are thefts, and there is no evidence that theft is an important source of guns to those who use them to commit violent crimes. This and other evidence challenge the popular belief that crimes are mostly committed using stolen weapons.