• How the U.S. Rail System Works

    A spate of train derailments, most notably in East Palestine, Ohio, has reinvigorated the debate over the nation’s railroad infrastructure. Here’s how U.S. rail could be brought up to speed.

  • Buildings Left Sanding in Turkey Offer Design Guidance for Future Earthquake-Resilient Construction

    The Feb. 6, 2023, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria put to the test advanced building technologies that can minimize damage and keep buildings functioning after a quake. Several hospitals built with one such technology – called a seismic isolation system – survived the earthquakes with almost no harm.

  • AI Could Set a New Bar for Designing Hurricane-Resistant Buildings

    Being able to withstand hurricane-force winds is the key to a long life for many buildings on the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast of the U.S. Determining the right level of winds to design for is tricky business, but support from artificial intelligence may offer a simple solution.

  • What Is the National Cybersecurity Strategy? What the Biden Administration Has Changed

    On 2 March 2023 the Biden administration released its first National Cybersecurity Strategy. Some of the key provisions in the Strategy relate to the private sector, both in terms of product liability and cybersecurity insurance. It also aims to reduce the cybersecurity burden on individuals and smaller organizations. It provides some innovative ideas that could strengthen U.S. cybersecurity in meaningful ways and help modernize America’s technology industry, both now and into the future.

  • Is Your Cybersecurity Strategy Undermined by These Six Common Pitfalls?

    Many security specialists harbor misconceptions about lay users of information technology, and these misconceptions can increase an organization’s risk of cybersecurity breaches. These issues include ineffective communications to lay users and inadequately incorporating user feedback on security system usability.

  • Preventing Fires and Explosions

    Lines in natural gas grids have to be maintained and serviced regularly. This entails using flares to vent the natural gas. With FlareSimulator, research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF have developed an assistive tool that calculates the correct distance of flares to houses, trees and other nearby objects. This makes it easy to maintain minimum distances and prevent potential hazards and explosions.

  • New Method Helps Locate Deposits of Critical Metals

    The global shift to a carbon-free energy system is set to drive a huge increase in the demand for rare or limited earth minerals. This presents an urgent need to locate new sustainable sources of these elements. New technique could help locate new deposits of critical metals needed to enable the green-energy transition.

  • An Early Warning System for Landslides Protects Sitka, Alaska

    A hard rain was rattling against the rooftops of Sitka, Alaska, as day broke on August 18, 2015. Just before 10 a.m., a hillside gave way. A river of mud, rocks, and broken trees surged down the slope and crashed through the subdivision.

  • New “Cosmic Concrete” Is Twice as Strong as Regular Concrete

    Building infrastructure in space is currently prohibitively expensive and difficult to achieve. Future space construction will need to rely on simple materials that are easily available to astronaut. Scientists have created a new material, dubbed “StarCrete,” which is made from extra-terrestrial dust, potato starch, and a pinch of salt. It could be used to build homes on Mars.

  • Taiwan’s High-End Semiconductors: Supply Chain Interdependence and Geopolitical Vulnerability

    What are the geopolitical implications of Taiwan’s dominance in global semiconductor production? How would the peaceful annexation or outright invasion of Taiwan by China affect the United States, its allies and partners, and the global economy? What are the United States’ options for mitigating or reversing the unfavorable effects of either unification scenario?

  • U.S. Unveils Aggressive National Cybersecurity Strategy

    The Biden administration is pushing for more comprehensive federal regulations to keep the online realm safer against hackers, including by shifting cybersecurity responsibilities away from consumers to industry and treating ransomware attacks as national security threats.

  • The Most Advanced Bay Area Earthquake Simulations to Be Publicly Available

    Accurately modeling the effects of an earthquake is possible, but it requires intricate physics-based models that can only be run on advanced supercomputers. The data from such models are invaluable for the earthquake research community and engineers seeking to build and retrofit earthquake-resilient homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Supercomputer-generated simulations will soon be accessible on an open-access website.

  • Breakthrough Alert Messaging for a Mobile Public

    It is in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) that the danger and damage from the growing risk of wildfires is most prevalent. Of paramount importance is alerting people in the path of fires and enabling their safe evacuation from the area.

  • Homes in Flood Zones Are Overvalued by Billions: Study

    Flooding is a costly and deadly natural hazard across the United States, and climate change will only make floods more frequent and more destructive. Failure to account for climate change means low-income homeowners could see their home values plunge.

  • Earthquake in Turkey Exposes Gap Between Seismic Knowledge and Action – but It Is Possible to Prepare

    The final death toll is likely to place the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria among the worst natural disaster. The sobering question to us, as disaster mitigation scholars, is whether this enormous loss of lives, homes and livelihoods could have been avoided. There is no way to prevent an earthquake from occurring, but what can be prevented – or at least curtailed – is the scale of the calamity caused by these inevitable tremors.