• New Tech Makes Detecting Airborne Ebola Virus Possible

    Natural outbreaks of the Ebola virus, while severe, are typically isolated and usually affect no more than a few hundred people at a time. However, from 2014-2016, infections from this deadly virus caused more than 11,000 deaths in West Africa. During this time, several cases of Ebola virus disease were also diagnosed in other countries, including the United States, due to infected travelers from West Africa that had unknowingly harbored and incubated the virus while en-route to their respective destinations.

  • Road Salts Are Threatening World's Freshwater Supplies

    When winter storms threaten to make travel dangerous, people often turn to salt, spreading it liberally over highways, streets and sidewalks to melt snow and ice. A new study warns that introducing salt into the environment — whether it’s for de-icing roads, fertilizing farmland or other purposes — releases toxic chemical cocktails that create a serious and growing global threat to our freshwater supply and to human health.

  • Interstate Water Wars Are Heating Up Along with the Climate

    By Robert Glennon

    Interstate water disputes are as American as apple pie. States often think a neighboring state is using more than its fair share from a river, lake or aquifer that crosses borders. Climate stresses are raising the stakes.

  • “Deprogramming” QAnon Followers Ignores Free Will and Why They Adopted the Beliefs in the First Place

    By Paul Thomas

    Recent calls to deprogram QAnon conspiracy followers are steeped in discredited notions about brainwashing. As popularly imagined, brainwashing is a coercive procedure that programs new long-term personality changes. Deprogramming, also coercive, is thought to undo brainwashing. Such deprogramming conversations do little to help us understand why people adopt QAnon beliefs. A deprogramming discourse fails to understand religious recruitment and conversion and excuses those spreading QAnon beliefs from accountability.

  • Epidemic of Firearm Injury Spurs New Wave of Research

    Fifty-five years ago, America’s death toll from automobile crashes was sky-high. Nearly 50,000 people died every year from motor vehicle crashes, at a time when the nation’s population was much smaller than today. But with help from data generated by legions of researchers, the country’s policymakers and industry made changes that brought the number killed and injured down dramatically. Experts welcome new federal funding for more injury prevention research to reduce the toll of a leading cause of death while respecting Second Amendment rights.

  • New Tool Assesses Risk of Wild-Life Origin Viruses

    Researchers have a developed a new framework and interactive web tool, SpillOver, which “estimates a risk score for wildlife-origin viruses, creating a comparative risk assessment of viruses with uncharacterized zoonotic spillover potential alongside those already known to be zoonotic.”

  • The U.S. Water and Wastewater Crisis – How Many Wake-up Calls Are Enough?

    In February, much of Texas plunged into darkness when the state’s electricity grid failed due to extreme cold weather conditions. What started as a foreseeable blackout quickly became a life-threatening calamity. “This catastrophe illustrates what happens when aging and inadequate infrastructure is hit by extreme rain or snow—an increasingly regular occurrence due to climate change,” Lucía Falcón Palomar, Obinna Maduka, and JoAnn Kamuf Ward write. “And, the matter extends well beyond Texas. It is easy to forget that, within U.S. borders, communities have long endured the conditions seen in Texas in February.”

  • What Has the Pandemic Revealed about the U.S. Health Care System — and What Needs to Change?

    With vaccinations for Covid-19 now underway across the nation, seven MIT scholars engaged in health and health care research share their views on what the pandemic has revealed about the U.S. health care system — and what needs to change.

  • Retaining Knowledge of Nuclear Waste Management

    Sandia National Laboratories have begun their second year of a project to capture important, hard-to-explain nuclear waste management knowledge from retirement-age employees to help new employees get up to speed faster. The project has experts share their experience with and knowledge of storage, transportation, and disposal with next generation scientists.

  • Florida Governor Working to Prevent “Catastrophic Flood” of Toxic Wastewater in Tampa Area

    Florida governor Ron DeSantis has vowed to prevent a “catastrophic flood” near the major city of Tampa. A leaking toxic wastewater reservoir has the potential to cause an environmental crisis in the region.

  • Monitoring Current and Future Biological Threats

    DHS S&T has awarded $199,648 to Mesur.io Inc., for analysis and reporting of outbreak-related data. The Mesur.io project proposes to adapt their Earthstream Platform to provide DHS and NBIC with data that tracks metrics related to an outbreak or emergence to predict various risks of a biological threat.

  • U.K. Launches the U.K. Health Security Agency

    On Thursday, 1 April, the U.K. launched the U.K. Health Security Agency, tasked with protecting the U.K. from future health threats and ensure the U.K. can respond to pandemics quickly and at greater scale. The primary focus for UKHSA in its initial phase of operation will be the continued fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, but the longer term goal is to work with global partners in an effort to create “a more robust international health architecture that will protect future generations.”

  • Biohazard: A Look at China’s Biological Capabilities and the Recent Coronavirus Outbreak

    By Corey Pfluke

    When people think about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they tend to think of things that go “boom.” The bigger the weapon, the bigger the boom, and the worse the impact. However, not all weapons need a big boom to be effective. Every day, millions of people are affected by a weapon that has the potential to do far more damage than a nuclear bomb, a weapon we cannot see, a weapon we call germs.

  • Pathogens Have the World’s Attention

    The novel coronavirus has demonstrated just how devastating a transmissible pathogen can be—and just how difficult to contain. Nathan Levine and Chris Li write that “the sobering truth is that, as deadly diseases go, the world got lucky. The global case fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 2 percent. One need only compare this to SARS (10 percent), smallpox (30 percent), pulmonary anthrax (80 percent), or Ebola (90 percent) to consider that the coronavirus could easily have been much, much worse.”

  • Intentional Youth Firearm Injuries Linked to Sociodemographic Factors

    Firearm injuries are a leading and preventable cause of injury and death among youth - responsible for an estimated 5,000 deaths and 22,000 non-fatal injury hospital visits each year in American kids. The researchers  identified distinct risk profiles for individuals aged 21 and younger, who arrived at emergency departments with firearm injuries over an 8-year period.