• Stanford’s John Donohue on Mass Shootings and the Uniquely American Gun Problem

    As Americans emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, the reality of the other U.S. epidemic—gun violence—has been made very clear after two mass shootings within a week. On 16 March, a gunman killed eight people at three Atlanta-area massage businesses, and on 22 March ten people were gunned down in a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. Stanford Law School’s John J Donohue III, a gun law expert, discusses mass shootings in the U.S., the challenges facing police when confronting powerful automatic weapons, and the prospect of gun control laws.

  • Homeland Security for Radiological and Nuclear Threats

    Radiation exposure events are complicated: there is a variety of radiation sources, and since radiation is invisible, and its effect may not always be immediately apparent, first responders and emergency services must prepare for a “worried well” of people requiring attention: individuals who do not have other physical injuries but are concerned about whether they have received a radiation exposure.

  • Many QAnon Followers Report Having Mental Health Diagnoses

    QAnon followers, who may number in the millions, are often viewed as a group associated with baseless and debunked conspiracy, terrorism, and radical action, such as the 6 January Capitol insurrection. But radical extremism and terror may not be the real concern from this group. A social psychologist who studies terrorists, and a security scholar, in their research for their forthcoming book — Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon — noticed that QAnon followers are different from the radicals they usually study in one key way: They are far more likely to have serious mental illnesses.

  • Health Risk? More than 500,000 Americans Live within 3 Miles of Natural Gas Flares

    More than a half-million Americans are exposed to oil and gas “flaring” events — the burning off of excess natural gas at production sites — resulting in potentially serious health risks.

  • Safeguarding the Nation’s Public Transit Systems

    While millions of Americans are working from home due to the ongoing pandemic, using public transportation remains a daily necessity for many. Public health measures like wearing a mask, installing new ventilation systems and filters, and reducing capacity all help to keep commuters safe – but there is always more that can be done to ensure the continued safety and security of mass transit nationwide.

  • Integrated Approaches to Disease Elimination

    The novel coronavirus pandemic has demanded an unprecedented, coordinated global response, which has culminated in increased global funding, and more importantly, increased attention to healthcare. But whilst efforts to produce and rollout effective diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines in record time are being widely acclaimed, there is a danger that this focus on COVID-19 threatens to derail decades of progress in the control and elimination of preventable infectious diseases, including malaria, polio and Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs).

  • Experts Tout Delaying 2nd COVID Vaccine Dose as U.S. Deaths Mount

    Following record COVID-19 deaths in January, several U.S. experts extolled the benefits of vaccinating as many people as possible with one dose of COVID vaccine before ensuring people receive the recommended second dose. Such a dosing strategy has already been used in the United Kingdom and Israel, two countries further ahead in vaccinating their populations than the United States.

  • Finding Toxic Chemicals in Drinking Water

    Most consumers of drinking water in the United States know that chemicals are used in the treatment processes to ensure the water is safe to drink. But they might not know that the use of some of these chemicals, such as chlorine, can also lead to the formation of unregulated toxic byproducts.

  • There Is No Medical Justification for Police Use of Neck Restraints: Neurologists

    Some police departments in the United States continue to teach officers that neck restraints are a safe method for controlling agitated or aggressive people, but that’s a dangerous myth, according to just published article written by three neurologists.

  • New Cyberattack Tricks Scientists into Making Dangerous Toxins, Synthetic Viruses

    An end-to-end cyber-biological attack, in which unwitting biologists may be tricked into generating dangerous toxins in their labs, has been discovered by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev cyber-researchers. It is currently believed that a criminal needs to have physical contact with a dangerous substance to produce and deliver it. However, malware could easily replace a short sub-string of the DNA on a bioengineer’s computer so that they unintentionally create a toxin producing sequence.

  • Deep Learning in the Emergency Department

    Using a deep-learning model designed for high-dimensional data, researchers have shown that it is possible to predict emergency department overcrowding from complex hospital records. This application of the “Variational AutoEncoder” deep-learning model is an example of how machine learning can be used to interpret and extract meaning from difficult data sets that are too voluminous or complex for humans to decipher.

  • Groundbreaking Research on Chlorine Spread

    Chlorine can kill in minutes if inhaled in high concentration. Since 2010, DHS S&T led a project, called Jack Rabbit, aiming to improve ways to detect and deal with chlorine spread. Recent events highlight the need for responders to be prepared with the best information possible for this type of hazard.

  • The Strategic Stockpile Failed; Experts Propose New Approach to Emergency Preparedness

    A new analysis of the United States government’s response to COVID-19 highlights myriad problems with an approach that relied, in large part, on international supply chains and the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). A panel of academic and military experts is instead calling for a more dynamic, flexible approach to emergency preparedness at the national level.

  • 68 Percent of Firearm Deaths Are from Self-Harm, Majority in Older Men in Rural Regions

    A new study of gun injuries and deaths in Ontario found that 68 percent of firearm-related deaths were from self-harm, and they most often occurred in older men living in rural regions, pointing to the need for targeted prevention efforts.

  • Wastewater Requires Additional Treatment to Reduce Spread of Coronavirus

    Wastewater must be further treated to minimize the risk of dissemination and infection of SARS-CoV-2, according to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers, who found coronavirus RNA in samples from Israeli water treatment plants.