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U.S.-China Trade War: Why Joe Biden Has Raised the Stakes
In a move to safeguard domestic industries and address unfair trade practices, the US president has quadrupled tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and raised levies on other green tech.
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Making Batteries Takes Lots of Lithium: Almost Half of It Could Come from Pennsylvania Wastewater
Most batteries used in technology like smartwatches and electric cars are made with lithium that travels across the world before even getting to manufacturers. But what if nearly half of the lithium used in the U.S. could come from Pennsylvania wastewater?
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Investigation: How Russia's Warplanes Get Their 'Brain Power' From the West, Despite Sanctions
The sanctions Western countries have imposed on Russia have many vulnerabilities –a recurring complaint for Kyiv as, handicapped by a deficit of weapons and ammunition, it watches Russian forces advance, hammering soldiers, civilians, and vital infrastructure.
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Tech Diplomacy: What It Is, and Why It’s Important
We need to get used to a new concept in international security: tech diplomacy. It means technological collaboration across sectors and between countries, but the simplicity of the idea shouldn’t disguise its importance.
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AI May Be to Blame for Our Failure to Make Contact with Alien Civilizations
Could AI be the universe’s “great filter” – a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilizations? The great filter hypothesis is ultimately a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox: why, in a universe vast and ancient enough to host billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not detected any signs of alien civilizations. The hypothesis suggests there are insurmountable hurdles in the evolutionary timeline of civilizations that prevent them from developing into space-faring entities.
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Seeing Behind the Mask
There is a need for face recognition to be able to “see behind the mask” for security and safety. Researchers discusses the potential of new software which will allow facial recognition to work despite the mask you use.
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Knocking Cloud Security Off Its Game
Public cloud services employ special security technologies. Computer scientists at ETH Zurich have now discovered a gap in the latest security mechanisms used by AMD and Intel chips. This affects major cloud providers.
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Beware of AI-based Deception Detection, Warns Scientific Community
Artificial intelligence may soon help to identify lies and deception. If only it were as easy as with Pinocchio: Researchers warn against premature use.
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What Is the CHIPS Act?
Extraordinary U.S. government incentives are proving popular with many large chipmakers, but it is too early to tell how much of the semiconductor industry can be lured back to the United States.
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Why Japan Is Investing in Semiconductors Once More
Japan was once the world’s leading chip manufacturer. Now, concerns over supply chains and geopolitical tensions have prompted the government to provide funding for foreign firms and domestic manufacturers.
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How Artificial Intelligence Can Transform U.S. Energy Infrastructure
Groundbreaking report provides ambitious framework for accelerating clean energy deployment while minimizing risks and costs in the face of climate change.
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Computer Scientists Unveil Novel Attacks on Cybersecurity
Researchers have found two novel types of attacks that target the conditional branch predictor found in high-end Intel processors, which could be exploited to compromise billions of processors currently in use. Intel and AMD issued security alerts based on the findings.
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Assessment of Israeli Strike on Iran near Esfahan
The Israeli attack on the S-300 missile defense system deployed around Iran’s nuclear facility in Esfahan demonstrated the capability of Israeli stand-off weapons to target deep inside Iran, evading detection and air defenses, leaving Iran’s nuclear and military facilities more vulnerable to attack.
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Deep Learning Model Helps in Crime Detection and Crime Hot Spot Prediction
New research has turned to emotional data alongside machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to develop technology that might one day help us better understand the criminal mind and perhaps even predict criminal activity so that it might be prevented.
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This Tiny Chip Can Safeguard User Data While Enabling Efficient Computing on a Smartphone
Researchers have developed a security solution for power-hungry AI models that offers protection against two common attacks.
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The long view
Are We Ready for a ‘DeepSeek for Bioweapons’?
Anthropic’s Claude 4 is a warning sign: AI that can help build bioweapons is coming, and could be widely available soon. Steven Adler writes that we need to be prepared for the consequences: “like a freely downloadable ‘DeepSeek for bioweapons,’ available across the internet, loadable to the computer of any amateur scientist who wishes to cause mass harm. With Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 having finally triggered this level of safety risk, the clock is now ticking.”
Bookshelf: Preserving the U.S. Technological Republic
The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation. But our present advantage cannot be taken for granted.
Autonomous Weapon Systems: No Human-in-the-Loop Required, and Other Myths Dispelled
“The United States has a strong policy on autonomy in weapon systems that simultaneously enables their development and deployment and ensures they could be used in an effective manner, meaning the systems work as intended, with the same minimal risk of accidents or errors that all weapon systems have,” Michael Horowitz writes.
Ukraine Drone Strikes on Russian Airbase Reveal Any Country Is Vulnerable to the Same Kind of Attack
Air defense systems are built on the assumption that threats come from above and from beyond national borders. But Ukraine’s coordinated drone strike on 1 June on five airbases deep inside Russian territory exposed what happens when states are attacked from below and from within. In low-level airspace, visibility drops, responsibility fragments, and detection tools lose their edge. Drones arrive unannounced, response times lag, coordination breaks.
Shots to the Dome—Why We Can’t Model US Missile Defense on Israel’s “Iron Dome”
Starting an arms race where the costs are stacked against you at a time when debt-to-GDP is approaching an all-time high seems reckless. All in all, the idea behind Golden Dome is still quite undercooked.
Our Online World Relies on Encryption. What Happens If It Fails?
Quantum computers will make traditional data encryption techniques obsolete; BU researchers have turned to physics to come up with better defenses.
Virtual Models Paving the Way for Advanced Nuclear Reactors
Computer models predict how reactors will behave, helping operators make decisions in real time. The digital twin technology using graph-neural networks may boost nuclear reactor efficiency and reliability.
Critical Minerals Don’t Belong in Landfills – Microwave Tech Offers a Cleaner Way to Reclaim Them from E-waste
E-waste recycling focuses on retrieving steel, copper, aluminum, but ignores tiny specks of critical materials. Once technology becomes available to recover these tiny but valuable specks of critical materials quickly and affordably, the U.S. can transform domestic recycling and take a big step toward solving its shortage of critical materials.
Microbes That Extract Rare Earth Elements Also Can Capture Carbon
A small but mighty microbe can safely extract the rare earth and other critical elements for building everything from satellites to solar panels – and it has another superpower: capturing carbon dioxide.
Virtual Models Paving the Way for Advanced Nuclear Reactors
Computer models predict how reactors will behave, helping operators make decisions in real time. The digital twin technology using graph-neural networks may boost nuclear reactor efficiency and reliability.
Critical Minerals Don’t Belong in Landfills – Microwave Tech Offers a Cleaner Way to Reclaim Them from E-waste
E-waste recycling focuses on retrieving steel, copper, aluminum, but ignores tiny specks of critical materials. Once technology becomes available to recover these tiny but valuable specks of critical materials quickly and affordably, the U.S. can transform domestic recycling and take a big step toward solving its shortage of critical materials.
Microbes That Extract Rare Earth Elements Also Can Capture Carbon
A small but mighty microbe can safely extract the rare earth and other critical elements for building everything from satellites to solar panels – and it has another superpower: capturing carbon dioxide.