• Bolstering Planetary Defense

    A new survey identifies scientific priorities and opportunities and makes funding recommendations to maximize the advancement of planetary science, astrobiology, and planetary defense in the next ten years.

  • New Algorithm to Simplify Decisions for Ship Channel Dredging

    Millions of dollars are at stake every time a major ship channel is cleaned up. Delays in dredging can cost even more by triggering increased risks, repeated maintenance and lost revenue. A new decision-support tool could become a game changer in the dredging of ship channels.

  • Marine Highways Bolster Supply Chain Efficiency, Resilience

    The increased use of the nation’s navigable waterways relieves landside congestion, provides new and efficient transportation options, increases the productivity of the surface transportation system, and strengthens the U.S. supply chains.

  • U.S. Flood Damage Risk Is Underestimated

    Researchers used artificial intelligence to predict where flood damage is likely to happen in the continental United States, suggesting that recent flood maps from FEMA do not capture the full extent of flood risk.

  • Drenching Rains Pose Greater Threat to Fire-Damaged Areas in West

    Areas in the western U.S. scarred by wildfires now face even more dangers: drenching rains. These rains inundate the burnt areas, causing significant destruction, including debris flows, mudslides, and flash floods, because the denuded landscape cannot easily contain the drenching moisture.

  • New Wildfire Detection System Receives Funding Boost

    The high intensity of the recent fire seasons in Oregon, coupled with the increasing wildfire risk this year as approximately three-quarters of the state is now in severe drought conditions, has highlighted how critical a new project, aiming to help with the early detection and monitoring of wildfires, is — both for firefighters and the general public.

  • The Future of 5G+ Infrastructure Could Be Built Tile by Tile

    Currently 5G+ technologies rely on large antenna arrays that are typically bulky and come only in very limited sizes, making them difficult to transport and expensive to customize. Researchers have developed a novel and flexible solution to address the problem. Their additively manufactured tile-based approach can construct on-demand, massively scalable arrays of 5G+‐enabled smart skins with the potential to enable intelligence on nearly any surface or object.

  • How Ukraine Has Defended Itself Against Cyberattacks – Lessons for the U.S.

    In 2014, as Russia launched a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea, and in the years that followed, Russian hackers hammered Ukraine. The cyberattacks went so far as to knock out the power grid in parts of the country in 2015. Russian hackers stepped up their efforts against Ukraine in the run-up to the 2022 invasion, but with notably different results. Those differences hold lessons for U.S. national cyber defense.

  • Protecting Solar Technologies from Cyberattack

    At a solar farm, power electronics devices convert direct current (DC) electricity generated by solar photovoltaic panels into alternating current (AC) electricity for use on the electrical grid. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates up to 80% of electricity could flow through power electronics devices by 2030. Researchers suggest a novel approach to safeguarding one possible target of a cyberattack – the nation’s solar farms.

  • Testing Similitude Laws of Multistory Masonry Buildings

    Earthquakes and other stressors on buildings pose a threat to their structural integrity that endangers human life. It helps to be able to calculate the behavior of buildings and test with small-scale models.

  • Cyber and Physical Security Should Collaborate: What Does It Take to Achieve This

    To understand and mitigate threats that cross the boundary between what is cyber and what is physical, some organizations have integrated their security resources to encourage them to work more closely together.

  • Giving New Life to Old Concrete Structures Through “Vascularization”

    Concrete is a ubiquitous building material, and it is often cited as the most consumed commodity on Earth, second only to potable water. As this inherited concrete infrastructure continues to age, maintaining and repairing concrete is of increasing strategic importance to both defense and civilian infrastructure. DARPA’s BRACE program aims to revitalize legacy DoD infrastructure to extend its serviceability.

  • The Ukrainian Economy: Where Now for the Future?

    An expert has warned that the impact of the war will be disastrous for the Ukrainian economy, regardless of the outcome. “War will always have a catastrophic impact. As you’d expect, production is collapsing, and the economy has given up percentages of GDP growth,” says a Cambridge University professor who is an economic adviser to Ukrainian President Zelensky.

  • Pivotal Battery Discovery Could Benefit Transportation, the Grid

    Researchers uncover new avenue for overcoming the performance decline that occurs with repeated charge-discharge cycling in the cathodes of next generation batteries.

  • Coastal Home Buyers Are Ignoring Rising Flood Risks, Despite Clear Warnings and Rising Insurance Premiums

    Homebuyers along the U.S. coasts can check each property’s flood risk as easily as they check the size of the bedrooms – most coastal real estate listings now include future flood risk details that take climate change into account. In Apollo Beach, for example, many of the properties are at least 9 out of 10 on the flood risk scale. That knowledge isn’t stopping homebuyers, though.