• White House threatens to veto House cybersecurity bill

    The White House on Tuesday threatened to veto the cybersecurity bill drafted by the House of Representatives. The house is expected to vote on the bill later this week. The cybersecurity bill died in the Senate last August after the White House said it would veto the bill.

  • Robot makes inspecting power lines simple, inexpensive

    Mechanical engineers invented a robot designed to scoot along utility lines, searching for damage and other problems that require repairs. Made of off-the-shelf electronics and plastic parts printed on an inexpensive 3D printer, the SkySweeper prototype could be scaled up for less than $1,000, making it significantly more economical than the two models of robots currently used to inspect power lines.

  • Scientists discover new materials to capture methane

    Scientists have discovered new materials to capture methane, the second highest concentration greenhouse gas emitted into the atmosphere. Unlike carbon dioxide, the largest emitted greenhouse gas, which can be captured both physically and chemically in a variety of solvents and porous solids, methane is completely non-polar and interacts very weakly with most materials.

  • Larger fire-fighting crews save lives, limit damage in high-rise fires

    Between 2005 and 2009 there were, on average, 15,700 high-rise structure fires annually in the United States. Average annual losses totaled 53 civilian deaths, 546 civilian injuries, and $235 million in property damage. When responding to fires in high-rise buildings, firefighting crews of five or six members — instead of three or four — are significantly faster in putting out fires and completing search-and-rescue operations, concludes a major new study.

  • Aging national power grid leaves U.S. vulnerable to storm-related outages

    In parts of the United States where the grid system is “out in the open” and exposed to the elements — especially in our older cities — the risk increases for widespread power outages as a result of weather-related events, leading to lengthy, costly repairs.

  • Direct CO2 removal could lower costs of climate mitigation

    Two broad strategies are typically offered to protect infrastructure from the consequences of climate change: reducing to emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere by using less fossil fuels, and mitigation (building sea walls, dams, and levees; changing building codes, etc.). Both approaches are costly. Scientists suggest that directly removing CO2 from the air could alter the costs of climate change mitigation. It could allow prolonging greenhouse-gas emissions from sectors like transport which are difficult, and thus expensive, to turn away from using fossil fuels.

  • House panel approves CISPA, angering privacy advocates

    The U.S. House Intelligence Committee passed a cybersecurity measure by an overwhelming vote, a measure which privacy advocates dislike because, they argue, it does not protect the personal information of citizens.

  • DHS, international tech-crime investigative body, partners on cybersecurity

    The High Technology Crime Investigation Association (HTCIA) said it would team up with DHS Stop. Think. Connect. Campaign’s National Network. The partnership will promote awareness of cyber security to industry, university, and government organizations nationwide.

  • A better single-photon emitter for quantum cryptography

    In a development that could make the advanced form of secure communications known as quantum cryptography more practical, researchers have demonstrated a simpler, more efficient single-photon emitter that can be made using traditional semiconductor processing techniques.

  • Mississippi towns build tornado-proof domes

    Following a devastating tornado two years ago, the town of Smithville, Mississippi, has started construction on a tornado-proof dome. The dome, to be built on the grounds of the local high school, will double as a gym and a storm shelter. Other towns in Mississippi have also begun their own dome projects.

  • Supercomputers allow for more realistic earthquake simulations

    A team of researchers has developed a highly scalable computer code that promises dramatically to cut both research times and energy costs in simulating seismic hazards throughout California and elsewhere. The team performed GPU-based benchmark simulations of the 5.4 magnitude earthquake that occurred in July 2008 below Chino Hills, near Los Angeles.

  • Oregon citizens preparing for the Big One

    A new study concludes that an earthquake of a magnitude 8.0 or above will strike off the coast of the state within the next fifty years. The Cascadia Fault, which runs from Northern California to British Columbia, Canada, causes a massive earthquake every 300 years or so, and the last time an earthquake hit the region was in the year 1700.

  • Making concrete “greener”

    Many factors determine the overall energy and environmental impact of concrete. Reducing the amount of portland cement, which reacts with water to bind all the sand, stone, and the other constituents of concrete as it hardens, provides the biggest opportunity. Portland cement manufacturing accounts for more than 5 percent of U.S. industrial carbon-dioxide emissions. In addition, the U.S. cement industry consumes 400 gigajoules of energy annually.

  • House Intelligence Committee to work on cybersecurity bill in camera

    The House Intelligence Committee will meet next week in order to draft a  cybersecurity bill, known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), but will not allow media members or the public to sit in on meetings during the process.

  • Fully secure communication

    Can worldwide communication ever be fully secure? Quantum physicists believe they can provide secret keys using quantum cryptography via satellite. These physicists have, for the first time, successfully transmitted a secure quantum code through the atmosphere from an aircraft to a ground station.