• New York City is especially vulnerable to rise in sea level

    Although low-lying Florida and Western Europe are often considered the most vulnerable to sea level changes, the northeast U.S. coast is particularly vulnerable because the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is susceptible to global warming

  • Handling nuclear materials for less

    During this century, nuclear plant decommissioning in the United Kingdom will likely produce thousands of waste packages that will be retrieved, conditioned, and stored for no less than £40 billion; BNS develops new way to reduce storage and handling costs of radioactive material

  • U.S. searching for a nuclear waste graveyard

    Congress has killed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository project, so the United States has no central location for storing nuclear waste; 50,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste that has already been produced by the U.S. nuclear plants; 30,000 metric tons more of nuclear waste is expected to be generated in the coming decades

  • 2007 cyber attack on Estonia launched by Kremlin-backed youth group

    Sustained cyber attacks in April and May 2007 on Web sites of the Estonian government paralyzed many government functions and commercial activities; it was the first such sustained attack on a country’s networks

  • Critics: Commercially driven deep packet inspection (DPI) is akin to wiretapping

    New technology now allows third parties to engage in deep packet inspection (DPI), a technique that makes it possible to peer inside packets of data transmitted across the Internet; data collected is then sold to other companies to allow them more targeted advertising

  • U.S. slow to pinpoint source of cyber attacks

    U.S. director of national intelligence tells lawmakers that “It often takes weeks and sometimes months of subsequent investigation [to identify the source of a cyber attack]… And even at the end of very long investigations you’re not quite sure who carried out the offensive”

  • France, Ireland to launch e-crime police training programs

    With the problem of cyber crime looming ever larger, European universities want the EC to back a plan to create an academically accredited cybercrime training program for law enforcement

  • BNS wins £13 million Dounreay decommissioning contract

    Dounreay was the site of a brave, new idea — a fast breeder nuclear reactor which would convert an unusable form of uranium to plutonium which could be recycled and turned into new reactor fuel; it would, that is, breed its own fuel, offering the prospect of electricity in abundance; it has not worked out that way; now it is the site of a big decommissioning effort

  • New design allows for using less steel in concrete beams

    NC State researchers discover how to use 30 percent less reinforcing steel in the manufacture of the concrete beams; the success of the project is already drawing interest from the concrete industry

  • Beads behavior may help in avalanche prediction

    Scientists blame the seeming impossibility of predicting the next big avalanche or earthquake on the inherent unpredictability of complex systems; a unique experiment, however, suggests that this idea may be wrong

  • Obama's budget cuts off most funds for Yucca Mountain repository

    The future of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository appears grim; Obama campaigned against the project, which is already more the 10 years behind schdule; new scientific evidence showing that water flows through Yucca Mountain much faster than initially believed raises the prospect that the nuclear waste would leach over time

  • New reactor design solves waste, weapon proliferation problems

    A new nuclear reactor design — called Traveling-Wave reactor — is noteworthy for three things: it comes from a privately funded research company, not the government; it would run on what is now waste, thus reducing dramatically the nuclear waste and weapon proliferation problems; and it could theoretically run for a couple of hundred years without refueling

  • U.K. government shelves multi-million intelligence net project

    The project, dubbed Scope, was designed to move security intelligence into the twenty-first century with the replacement of a systems for distributing reports by paper with an electronic system; government abandons project for unspecified technical problems

  • Personal information of 80,000 NYPD officers stolen

    A NYPD pension telecommunications director swiped backup tapes that contained addresses, Social Security numbers, medical records, and direct-deposit information on nearly 80,000 current and retired police officers

  • New cybersecurity guidelines simplify, prioritize protections

    NIST issues guidelines which aim to simplify the thousands of pages of cybersecurity guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology; managers say the NIST guidance is hard to implement and harder to audit