• Obama to bolster food safety

    Each year, about 76 million people in the United States are sickened by contaminated food, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and about 5,000 die; thirty-five years ago, the FDA. did annual inspections of about half of the nation’s food-processing facilities; last year, the agency inspected just 7,000 of the nearly 150,000 domestic food facilities; its oversight of foreign plants was even spottier

  • U.S. searching for a nuclear waste graveyard

    Congress has killed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository project, so the United States has no central location for storing nuclear waste; 50,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste that has already been produced by the U.S. nuclear plants; 30,000 metric tons more of nuclear waste is expected to be generated in the coming decades

  • Project allowing Mexican long-haul trucks into U.S. ends

    Two years ago the Department of Transportation launched a pilot project allowing Mexican long-haul trucks to carry their cargo from the Mexican origin all the way to the U.S. destination, without transferring the cargo to an American carrier; Congress removed funding for the project from the omnibus spending bill

  • Terrorist Watchlist reaches 1 million entries (representing about 400,000 individuals)

    U.S. Terrorist Watchlist reaches 1 million entries; since many individuals on the list have several entries owing to the different ways in which their names may be rendered, the number of individuals on the list is about 400,000

  • Innovative approach to science and technology education in Pakistan

    A unique experiment: a combination of private money, government support, and intellectual leadership is helping to build the first private research school for science and engineering in Pakistan

  • Critics: Commercially driven deep packet inspection (DPI) is akin to wiretapping

    New technology now allows third parties to engage in deep packet inspection (DPI), a technique that makes it possible to peer inside packets of data transmitted across the Internet; data collected is then sold to other companies to allow them more targeted advertising

  • Napolitano introduces make over top Real ID law

    Napolitano, a harsh critic of the Real ID Act while governor of Arizona, adopts the “mend it, don’t end it” approach to the law

  • U.S. slow to pinpoint source of cyber attacks

    U.S. director of national intelligence tells lawmakers that “It often takes weeks and sometimes months of subsequent investigation [to identify the source of a cyber attack]… And even at the end of very long investigations you’re not quite sure who carried out the offensive”

  • U.S., Israel differ sharply on Iran's nuclear threat

    Dennis Blair tells Senate committee that Iran has not yet made decision to pursue nuclear weapons; Pentagon leaders also differ in their view of Iran’s intentions, capabilities

  • 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

  • France, Ireland to launch e-crime police training programs

    With the problem of cyber crime looming ever larger, European universities want the EC to back a plan to create an academically accredited cybercrime training program for law enforcement

  • Regulate armed robots before it's too late

    Unmanned machines now carry out more and more military and police missions; soon these robots will be allowed to make autonomous life-and-death decisions: when to shoot — and at whom; a philosopher argues that we should be more mindful of the ethical implications of this trend

  • U.K. police equipped with additional helicopters

    The U.K. government has created a capital grant to buy helicopters for local police units; Oxford-based Eurocopter benefits

  • BNS wins £13 million Dounreay decommissioning contract

    Dounreay was the site of a brave, new idea — a fast breeder nuclear reactor which would convert an unusable form of uranium to plutonium which could be recycled and turned into new reactor fuel; it would, that is, breed its own fuel, offering the prospect of electricity in abundance; it has not worked out that way; now it is the site of a big decommissioning effort

  • New anti-crime approach: vigilant windows

    Windows are coated with special polymer which contains nanoparticles that convert light into fluorescent radiation; this radiation is channeled to the edges of the window where it is detected by sensors; when a person approaches the window, the sensors wirelessly relay this currency information to a computer program, which alerts security officials of the potential intruder