• Iran indicates willingness to rethink nuclear program in exchange for sanction relief

    As part of a series of steps designed to present post-election Iran as more pragmatic, President Hassan Rouhani and his advisers indicated they would be willing to consider curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from the crippling economic sanctions imposed on Iran. Some Western experts say that all these steps are more than mere cosmetic changes, while skeptics note that Obama has reached out to Iran before, with no results. Veterans of past nuclear negotiations with Iran also noted that it is likely that Rouhani’s team may not yet fully understand the kinds of concessions that the Islamic republic would be required to make to have the most painful economic sanctions lifted.

  • Teams show robust radio techniques at Spectrum Challenge event

    Radios are used for a wide range of tasks, from the most mundane to the most critical of communications, from garage door openers to first responders to military operations. Wireless devices often inadvertently interfere with and disrupt radio communications, and in battlefield environments adversaries may intentionally jam friendly communications. To stimulate the development of radio techniques that can overcome these impediments, the agency launched its Spectrum Challenge — a competitive demonstration of robust radio technologies that seek to communicate reliably in congested and contested electromagnetic environments without direct coordination or spectrum preplanning.

  • Updated, expanded “Crime Scene Investigation” guide now available

    Investigators and first responders can find the latest recommendations on crime scene investigations in the newly updated Crime Scene Investigation, A Guide for Law Enforcement.

  • Pentagon to review security clearance procedure, military base security

    Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel acknowledged at a news conference on Wednesday that the procedure for granting security clearances will be looked at, and probably needed fixing, telling reporters that “a lot of red flags” about Alexis’s past behavior were missed. Among the questions will be whether more personal information — even short of information on a criminal conviction — should be looked at before a security clearance is granted, and whether security clearance reviews should be conducted more often. Hagel also announced that he had ordered a broad review of procedures at military bases around the world.

  • California mulls costly earthquake early-warning system

    The price of an early warning system which would alert California officials about an earthquake within sixty seconds before a major temblor strikes would be $80 million. The California legislature passed a bill on 13 September, requiring the state to develop the earthquake warning system, but it is unclear whether Governor Jerry Brown will sign the bill.

  • NASA, DHS to demonstrate disaster rescue tool

    NASA and DHS are collaborating on a new radar device which detects heartbeats of victims trapped in wreckage. The device, known as the Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response (FINDER), can locate individuals buried under as much as thirty feet of crushed materials, hidden behind twenty feet of solid concrete, or from a distance of 100 feet in open spaces.

  • UN inspectors' repot on gas attack points to Assad’s elite military units

    Russia may say publicly that it does not know who launched the deadly 21 August gas attack on two Damascus neighborhoods, but the Russians must have had an inkling: Russia’s UN ambassador agreed to have an international team of weapon inspectors sent to Syria to investigate the 21 August attack on one condition: the inspectors’ mandate was narrowed to verifying that chemical weapons were used, but specifically prohibited the inspectors from assigning responsibility to the attack. Russia’s effort to shield Assad has resulted in a report, submitted Monday to the UN Security Council, which does not explicitly name the Syrian regime as the party launching the attack, but details buried in the report point directly at elite military formations loyal to Assad.

  • A new generation of odor-releasing materials for training dogs

    Traditionally, the training of bomb-sniffing dogs has been a hazardous job, but newly developed odor-releasing materials could take the risk out of that work. Scientists are seeking to patent a novel system that can capture scents and release them over time.

  • U.S. still has 3,100 tons of chemical weapons to be destroyed

    Last weekend’s U.S.-Russia agreement on Syria’s chemical weapons has put on hold a U.S. strike on Syria. The pause may allow a reflection on the fact that the United States possesses one of the world’s largest chemical arsenals. Sixteen years after a treaty banning of chemical weapons went into effect, the Unites States has 3,100 tons stored in Colorado and Kentucky.

  • Using spooks’ software to select wine

    Delectable is a mobile application that allows users to explore wines by using technology currently employed to locate terrorists and prevent bank frauds. The application is considered to have the world’s largest database of wine, providing information on more than two million wines and offering users an option to purchase selected wines.

  • History of explosives highlighted in museum exhibit

    For more than seventy years, Los Alamos National Laboratory has been a frontrunner in explosives research, development, and applications. To highlight the Laboratory’s work in the field of explosives, the Bradbury Science Museum is opening a new exhibit, titled “The Science of Explosives.”

  • Experts question ambitious Syria chemical weapons agreement

    The announcements in Geneva by Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were bold: President Bashar al-Assad has a week to provide detailed, accurate, and comprehensive information about Syria’s entire chemical weapons program: research labs, production facilities, test sites, chemical storage depots, and munitions kept by every military unit. Experts say that the tight timetable the agreement requires for disclosure of stockpile, destruction of production facilities, and the destruction of the chemical weapons themselves, would not only set a speed record, but that that it cannot be accomplished even with Syria’s full cooperation.

  • Syria’s chemical program, inventory

    The Syrian chemical weapons program began in the 1970s when the Hafez al-Assad regime purchased chemical munitions from the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, Syria launched a broad program of acquiring the materials, products, and knowledge necessary to set up an autonomous chemical weapons production capacity. In the nearly four decades of acquisition, research, development, and production, Syria has amassed what experts consider to be the world’s largest chemical weapons stockpile, consisting of about 1,000 tons of chemical agents and precursor chemicals.

  • More equitable access to DNA identification after disaster or conflict needed: experts

    The April 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory Building in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,130 people were killed, is only the latest in a long line of events that has made plain the plight of the families whose loved ones go missing after conflict and disaster. Experts argue that international structures are needed to promote more equal access to forensic identification technologies, ensure their fair and efficient use, and provide uniform protections to participants following large-scale conflict and disaster.

  • New study shows link between rates of gun ownership and homicides

    A new study shows that U.S. states with higher estimated rates of gun ownership experience a higher number of firearms-related homicides. The study, covering thirty years (1981-2010) in all fifty states, found a “robust correlation” between estimated levels of gun ownership and actual gun homicides at the state level, even when controlling for factors typically associated with homicides. For each 1 percentage point increase in the prevalence of gun ownership, the state firearm homicide rate increases by 0.9 percent, the authors found.