• Making Airfield Assessments Automatic, Remote, and Safe

    U.S. Air Force engineer and PhD student Randall Pietersen is using AI and next-generation imaging technology to detect pavement damage and unexploded munitions.

  • Security Veins: Advanced Biometric Authentication Through AI and Infrared

    Hyperspectral imaging and AI can identify individuals using blood vessels in palms.

  • New AI Defense Method Shields Models from Adversarial Attacks

    Neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence modeled on the connectivity of the human brain, are driving critical breakthroughs across a wide range of scientific domains. But these models face significant threat from adversarial attacks, which can derail predictions and produce incorrect information.

  • Research Drives Innovation in Gen-IV Reactor Safety and Efficiency

    All U.S. nuclear reactors, which currently provide more than half of the nation’s carbon-free power, are first- or second-generation light water reactors. This means they use water as both a coolant and neutron moderator to control the nuclear reaction and produce useful electricity. Ut researchers pursue all kinds of reactor designs, and nuclear engineers at Argonne frame the future of nuclear design.

  • U.S. Cuts to Science and Technology Could Fast-Track China’s Tech Dominance

    Is the United States now trying to lose the technology race with China? It certainly seems to be. The race is tight, and now the Trump administration is slashing funding for the three national institutions that have underpinned science and technology (S&T) and what advantage the US still has.

  • B61-12 System Production Ends, Sustainment Begins

    A nuclear weapon milestone: in December, Sandia Lab has completed the last production unit of the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb.

  • New Technology Will Help Satellites Avoid Collisions in Space

    Space is becoming more crowded every day, with over 11,000 active satellites and nearly 40,000 pieces of debris in low Earth orbit. Postage stamp-sized “license plates” can help track and protect satellites in low Earth orbit.

  • 3 Questions: Exploring the Limits of Carbon Sequestration

    Elevated CO2 levels can lead to a phenomenon known as the CO2 fertilization effect, where plants grow more and absorb greater amounts of carbon, providing a cooling effect. While this effect has the potential to be a natural climate change mitigator, the extent of how much carbon plants can continue to absorb remains uncertain. MIT assistant professor César Terrer discusses pioneering volcano research to track carbon dynamics in tropical forests.

  • Exploring the New Nuclear Energy Landscape

    In the last few years, the U.S. has seen a resurgence of interest in nuclear energy and its potential for helping meet the nation’s growing demands for clean electricity and energy security. Meanwhile, nuclear energy technologies themselves have advanced, opening up new possibilities for their use.

  • How Progress Happens

    On Feb. 7, the National Institutes of Health issued a notice, effective Feb. 10, to cap reimbursements for indirect costs (IDC) associated with its grants. The world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, the NIH supports investigations into, among other things, efforts to fight cancer, control infectious disease, understand neurodegenerative disorders, and improve mental health. Harvard’s vice provost for research details crucial role of NIH support in science and medicine.

  • Can Voice-to-Text AI Help Scientists Predict Earthquakes?

    By using automatic speech recognition designed to encode waveforms for translation, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory were able to modify this voice-to-text AI to correctly predict the timing of a slip during a repeating collapse sequence producing approximately magnitude-5 earthquakes at the Kīlauea volcano on Hawai’i.

  • Spyware Is Spreading Far Beyond Its National-Security Role

    Spyware is increasingly exploited by criminals or used to suppress civil liberties, and this proliferation is in part due to weak regulation.

  • The U.K. Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All

    The United Kingdom is demanding that Apple create an encryption backdoor to give the government access to end-to-end encrypted data in iCloud. Encryption is one of the best ways we have to reclaim our privacy and security in a digital world filled with cyberattacks and security breaches, and there’s no way to weaken it in order to only provide access to the “good guys.”

  • Volcanic Ash Can Be Used for Radiation Shielding

    Radiation shielding is essential for hospitals, industrial sites, and nuclear facilities. Researchers have found a surprising new use for the copious amounts of volcanic ash scattered across the Philippines: it can be used to shield against harmful radiation.

  • Marine Heatwaves: A Rising Challenge for Naval Warfare

    We now know that rising sea temperatures will affect sonar performance, sometimes greatly affecting submarines’ ability to find ships and other submarines, and ships’ ability to find them. This leaves us wondering about the specific effects of another phenomenon: marine heatwaves, which can create large and sudden changes in temperatures.