• Meet the Maggot: How This Flesh-Loving, Butt-Breathing Marvel Helps Us Solve Murders

    Not all superheroes wear capes – some live in rubbish bins, garbage dumps and on dead bodies. Maggots, the humble little legless larvae, are actually nature’s antibacterial soldiers. Their ability to survive and thrive in decomposing matter is making them our new secret weapon in forensic entomology – the science of using insects to solve crimes.

  • Controlled Burning of Natural Environments Could Help Offset Carbon Emissions

    Planting trees and suppressing wildfires do not necessarily maximize the carbon storage of natural ecosystems. A new study has found that prescribed burning can actually lock in or increase carbon in the soils of temperate forests, savannahs and grasslands.

  • DOD Releases Report on Countering Extremist Activities

    DOD last week issued a report on addressing the challenge of extremist activities in the ranks. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that “We believe only a very few violate this oath by participating in extremist activities, but even the actions of a few can have an outsized impact on unit cohesion, morale and readiness - and the physical harm some of these activities can engender can undermine the safety of our people.”

  • Blurry Ideologies and Strange Coalitions: The Evolving Landscape of Domestic Extremism

    Students of extremism and domestic terrorism have noticed an intriguing phenomenon: the convergence of far right and far left extremists and the breakdown of old ideological walls. Far-right extremists have valorized the Unabomber and praised the Taliban; a re-launched white supremacist group announced a new “Bolshevik focus” calling for the liquidation of the capitalist class; a growing ecofascist youth subculture joins with extreme racists in a call for the creation of a white ethnostate. “These trends highlight the strange and unanticipated ways in which domestic violent extremism scenes in the United States are fragmenting and reassembling,” they write.

  • What Will Taiwan Do If China Invades?

    China claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island 160 kilometers away and has not dropped the threat of force, if needed, to capture it. The two sides have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s. The specter of a war has captured attention since mid-2020 when the People’s Liberation Army began almost daily military aircraft flyovers over a sea west of the island, which experts said is China’s attempt to normalize its military operations near Taiwan.

  • U.S. Guns Sales Have Been Surging: Study

    An estimated 7.5 million U.S. adults became new gun owners over a recent 28-month span, sharply increasing the prospects for home accidents or people taking their own lives, according to new research.

  • Increasingly Frequent Wildfires Linked to Human-Caused Climate Change: Study

    New research strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount of land in the western U.S. that has been destroyed by large wildfires over the past two decades.

  • Train Engineer Inspired by Covid-19 Conspiracy Theory to Intentionally Derail Locomotive

    A train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles pleaded guilty last week to a federal terrorism charge for intentionally running a locomotive at full speed off the end of railroad to “wake people up” to a government plot to use Covid-19 as a pretext to “take over” the country.

  • UN Fails to Agree on “Killer Robot” Ban While Nations Pour Billions into Autonomous Weapons Research

    Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent UN Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

  • U.S.: Iran's Nuclear Breakout Time “Really Short”

    An unnamed source within the Biden administration has said that the amount of time required for Iran to develop nuclear weapons if it chooses to do so is “really short,” adding that the situation was “alarming.”

  • To Intervene or Not to Intervene: That Is the Question

    When a crisis or conflict threaten U.S. interests, a direct military intervention is one of the options American decisionmakers must consider. A new report offers a framework that can be used to rigorously consider the trade-offs between intervening militarily early in a war or crisis, intervening later, and not intervening at all, as well as the trade-offs involved in decisions regarding the size of the potential intervention force to be employed.

  • Securing U.S. Democracy

    Most of the homeland security architecture built in the past twenty years has been devoted to protecting Americans from an act of international terrorism. Carrie Cordero writes that as a result, Americans are safer than they were twenty years ago from a terrorist attack directed or inspired by foreign groups on U.S. soil. She says, though, that more significantly, the threats to American safety and security have compounded in the past two decades. “These disparate threats and circumstances have challenged the effectiveness of the homeland security enterprise.”

  • Getting Quickly to the Scene of a HAZMAT Incident

    During a HAZMAT response, the U.S. Coast Guard’s National Strike Force (NSF), comprised of five specialized units of first responders, are ready to rapidly deploy to the scene. Getting quickly to the scene of a HAZMAT incident is critical—whether it’s an oil spill or release of chemical, biological, or radiological materials.

  • Community, Faith, and Public Violence

    Communities with more religious congregations have fewer mass public shootings, according to new research. Outside the bounds of community, individuals can succumb to a tide of despair and solitude. Some give in to alienation, and succumb to deaths of despair from suicide or addiction. Some choose to enact their rage on the community itself, committing horrific acts of random violence.

  • The Impact of Drone Warfare on World Order

    Much of the current literature on armed drones focuses on their proliferation across countries, effectiveness against terrorists, and the legal, moral, and ethical impacts of their use. A new collection of essays examines the trade-offs imposed by drone warfare for global order.