• America's latest wonder: Hoover Dam companion bridge

    After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. feared a terrorist with a truck bomb could attack the Hoover Dam, potentially flooding vast areas and disrupting water and power supplies to several states; semi-trucks were banned from bridge, forced to take route to Las Vegas that is more than forty miles longer; new 1,900-foot-long structure will reroutes traffic off of the two-lane road atop the dam, will improve traffic in the region, and help protect the dam from terrorist threats; it is the seventh highest bridge in the world and it is held up by the longest arch in the Western Hemisphere

  • PG&E to improve pipelines safety

    Following the deadly natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California, on 9 September, PG&E said it would upgrade its California pipeline system to boost safety; a key element will be the installation of hundreds of automatic shutoff valves to replace the current manual valves; the company would also contribute $10 million to a nonprofit group to develop better diagnostic tools to determine the condition of underground pipelines

  • Geologists warn of warming-induced landslides flattening cities

    There are 39 cities around the world with populations greater than 100,000 — and an untold number of smaller towns and villages — which are situated within 100 kilometers of a volcano that has collapsed in the past and which may, therefore, be capable of collapsing in the future; thinning glaciers on volcanoes could destabilize vast chunks of summit cones, triggering mega-landslides capable of flattening cities such as Seattle and devastating local infrastructure

  • Chertoff calls for cyber-deterrence doctrine

    More than 100 countries now have cyber-espionage and cyber-attack capabilities; both kinds of attack used the same tools and might be used to mount anything from a garden variety cyber-espionage attack resulting in the corruption of financial data to something that might result in loss of life, such as a possible attack against air-traffic control systems; governments should formulate a doctrine to stave off cyberattacks similar to the cold war-era principle of nuclear deterrence, according to former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff.; “Everyone needs to understand to rules of the game”

  • With rising sea levels, the time for adapting is now

    Coastal development has accelerated over the past fifty years; many of the world’s megacities are situated at the coast and new infrastructure worth billions of dollars is being constructed; these developments assume that the stable sea levels of the past several millennia will continue — but this assumption is no longer true

  • Study: U.S. grid robust, hard to bring down

    Reliance on a particular kind of mathematical model — a so-called topological model — for understanding complex systems has led a growing number of researchers to conclude that the U.S. electric grid is exceedingly vulnerable to disruption; two mathematicians now argue that these studies “have ignored the physics of how things actually work — like electricity infrastructure”; an examination of how the grid actually works would show that the U.S. electrical grid is probably more secure that many people realize

  • U.S. power grid easy prey for hackers

    Attackers could manipulate power-grid data by breaking into substations and intercepting communications between substations, grid operators, and electricity suppliers; grid hackers could make millions of dollars at the expense of electricity consumers by influencing electricity markets; they could also make the grid unstable, causing blackouts

  • Large parts of the world are drying up

    The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa, and South America, have been drying up in the past decade as a result of intensified “evapotranspiration” — the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere

  • Experts: Stuxnet "a game changer"

    EU cybersecurity agency warns that the Stuxnet malware is a game changer for critical information infrastructure protection; PLC controllers of SCADA systems infected with the worm might be programmed to establish destructive over/under pressure conditions by running pumps at different frequencies; Dr. Udo Helmbrecht, chief of EU’s cybersecurity agency: “Stuxnet is a new class and dimension of malware—- The fact that perpetrators activated such an attack tool, can be considered as the ‘first strike’ against major industrial resources. This has tremendous effect on how to protect national [cyber and critical infrastructure] in the future’

  • Securing privately owned critical infrastructure networks

    Securing the industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks that are used to run the U.S. critical infrastructure is a daunting job; as in other areas of critical infrastructure protection, ICS and SCADA risk mitigation falls to private owner-operators, as do the costs

  • Iran: Stuxnet part of Western sabotage campaign

    Iran claims that the Stuxnet virus which infected more than 30,000 computers used in industrial control systems in the country — many of them in Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, especially to yet-to-become operational Bushehr nuclear power plant — is part of a covert Western plot to derail its nuclear program; this is the most direct admission by Iran that the West — read: the United States and Israel — have been engaged in a systematic covert sabotage campaign to derail Iran’s weapons program

  • Growing concerns about U.S. aging gas pipeline network

    A disturbing realization has emerged from the wreckage of a deadly pipeline explosion in California: There are thousands of pipes just like it across the United States; experts say that pipes of some age were put in the ground before the dense population arrived and now the dense population is right over the pipes; thousands of pipelines across the United States fit the bill, and serious incidents are not infrequent; federal officials have recorded 2,840 significant gas pipeline accidents since 1990, more than a third causing deaths and significant injuries

  • Gas pipeline info kept secret for security reasons, hampering disaster response

    The United States has a 2.5-million-mile network of gas transmission lines; citing fears that terrorists might try to blow up the U.S. natural gas pipelines, federal regulators and the industry have made it extremely difficult for homeowners to learn the location of pipelines and any history of inspections and repairs — information that safety advocates say could save lives

  • San Bruno gas pipe failure started with bad welds or corrosion

    The failure of a natural-gas pipeline that ruptured three weeks ago, devastating a San Bruno neighborhood, may have started along a weld or in a weakened section of the 54-year-old pipe; “This pipe basically unpeeled and failed catastrophically,” said Tom Bowman, chairman of the thermosciences division in Stanford University’s mechanical engineering department

  • Stuxnet, world's first "cyber superweapon," attacks China

    Stuxnet, the most sophisticated malware ever designed, could make factory boilers explode, destroy gas pipelines, or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction; experts suspect it was designed by Israeli intelligence programmers to disrupt the operations of Iran’s nuclear facilities — especially that country’s centrifuge farms and the nuclear reactor in Bushehr; it has now infected Chinese industrial control systems as well; one security expert says: “The Stuxnet worm is a wake-up call to governments around the world—- It is the first known worm to target industrial control systems”