• Deep earthquakes simulated in the laboratory

    More than twenty years ago, researchers discovered a high-pressure failure mechanism that they proposed then was the long-sought mechanism of very deep earthquakes (earthquakes occurring at more than 400 km depth). The result was controversial because seismologists could not find a seismic signal in the Earth that could confirm the results. Seismologists have now found the critical evidence. Indeed, beneath Japan, they have even imaged the tell-tale evidence and showed that it coincides with the locations of deep earthquakes.

  • Missed opportunities to save water, energy

    Water and wastewater managers are missing substantial opportunities to save energy and money, according to a new report.The report also identifies significant gaps in knowledge about the amount of water used to extract energy resources such as natural gas, oil, and coal, and to generate electricity.

  • NIST announces five grants to pilot Trusted Identity technologies

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced more than $7 million in grants to five organizations to fund pilot projects as part of the government’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) initiative. The NSTIC initiative is a collaborative effort among the private sector, advocacy groups and public-sector agencies to support technologies that enable individuals and organizations to use secure, efficient, convenient and interoperable identity credentials to access online services in a way that promotes confidence, privacy, choice and innovation.

  • 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.

  • October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

    This October marks the tenth National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM), an effort to educate millions of people each year about the importance of online safety and security. During the month, leaders from the public and private sectors will come together to advance its universal theme that protecting the Internet is “Our Shared Responsibility.”

  • Cyberweapons likely to be an integral part of any U.S.-Syria clash

    A U.S.-led military attack on Syria may have been averted, at least for a while, by the Russian proposal to negotiate the transfer of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks to international control, but had the United States gone ahead with a strike, there is little doubt that cyberattacks would have been used by both sides. If the United States decides to attack Syria in the future, we should expect cyberweapons to be used.

  • Cold-formed steel rebuilds earthquake-resistant architecture

    When engineers attempt to make a building earthquake-resistant, they use specific structural components, appropriately called details, to absorb earthquake forces and help direct some of those forces back to the ground. That works, but when an earthquake hits, the entire building reacts, not just the sections containing details. Even though academic research has led to improvements to the original building codes over the decades, there is much to be learned about the entire system of a cold-formed steel building as it responds to an earthquake.

  • New technique developed to assess the cost of major flood damage

    A new approach to calculating the cost of damage caused by flooding was presented at the International Conference of Flood Resilience: Experiences in Asia and Europe which was held last week. The methodology combines information on land use with data on the vulnerability of the area to calculate the cost of both past and future flooding events.

  • “Climate Change, Water Conflicts, and Human Security” report released

    Increasingly, climate change and the associated increase in the frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and rising sea level, are acknowledged as not only having humanitarian impacts, but also creating national and regional political and security risks. While people and governments can adapt to these impacts, their capacity to do so varies.

  • Study links prehistoric climate shift to asteroid or comet impact

    For the first time, a dramatic climate shift which has long fascinated scientists has been linked to the impact in Quebec of an asteroid or comet. The event took place about 12,900 years ago, at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, and marks an abrupt global change to a colder, dryer climate, with far-reaching effects on both animals and humans.

  • Global warming increasing risk of record heat: scientists

    Drought shriveled crops in the Midwest, massive wildfires raged in the West, and East Coast cities sweltered. The summer of 2012 was a season of epic proportions, especially July, the hottest month in the history of U.S. weather record keeping. As the world warms, it is likely that we will continue to see such calamitous weather. Scientists caution against trying to determine whether global warming caused any individual extreme event, but they say that the observed global warming clearly appears to have affected the likelihood of record heat.

  • High performance concrete to rescue Brittany's lighthouses

    Lighthouses in Brittany, France, have stood at the intersection of violent currents, blinding storms, and breaking surf for over a century. A lighthouse turret off the coast of Lorient in Brittany has been enhanced with technology developed for bridges. This trial run will test the application of Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC).

  • Limestone powder enhances performance of “green” concrete

    Adding limestone powder to “green” concrete mixtures — those containing substantial amounts of fly ash, a byproduct of coal-burning power plants — can significantly improve performance. The promising laboratory results suggest a path to increasing greatly the use of fly ash in concrete, leading to sizable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, construction costs and landfill volumes.

  • Knowing exposure risks crucial to saving structures from wildfires

    A recent study of one of California’s most devastating wildland fires strongly suggests that measures for reducing structural damage and property loss from wildland urban interface (WUI) fires are most effective when they are based on accurate assessments of exposure risks both for individual structures and the community as a whole.

  • U.S. “black budget” reveals unwieldy bureaucracy, misplaced priorities: expert

    Classified budget figures and successes and failures by American intelligence agencies, exposed for the first time this week by the Washington Post, show a massive bureaucracy with misplaced priorities, according to a cybersecurity and privacy expert. “The major failure identified in all of the post-9/11 assessments was a ‘failure to connect the dots,’” the expert said. “Nevertheless, the vast majority of the black budget is being spent on data acquisition — collecting more dots — rather than analysis.”