• Plan B: Keeping Nuclear Power Plants Cool in a Warmer, Drier Climate

    Waterways — tried and true cooling sources for nuclear power plants — could get warmer due to global climate change. Climate scientists and nuclear science and engineering experts are joining forces to develop a plan B for nuclear power.

  • Cops Running DNA-Manufactured Faces Through Face Recognition Is a Tornado of Bad Ideas

    In keeping with law enforcement’s grand tradition of taking antiquated, invasive, and oppressive technologies, making them digital, and then calling it innovation, police in the U.S. recently combined two existing dystopian technologies in a brand new way to violate civil liberties.

  • Artificial Reef Could Protect Marine life, Reduce Storm Damage

    MIT engineers designed a sustainable and cost-saving structure which aims to dissipate more than 95 percent of incoming wave energy using a small fraction of the material normally needed.

  • The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies

    From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.

  • Allowing More Juice to Flow Through Power Lines Could Hasten Clean Energy Projects

    If the thousands of proposed solar, wind and battery energy projects got built, they would more than double the amount of electricity that is currently produced nationwide and get the U.S. much closer to its clean energy targets. But there’s one big problem: America’s power lines can’t carry that much juice. Grid-enhancing technologies can help existing lines carry more electricity.

  • Strengthening the Grid’s ‘Backbone’ with Hydropower

    Argonne-led studies investigate how hydropower could help add more clean energy to the grid, how it generates value as grids add more renewable energy, and how liner technology can improve hydropower efficiency.

  • A Battery Price War Is Kicking Off That Could Soon Make Electric Cars Cheaper

    The main cost of an electric vehicle (EV) is its battery. The high cost of energy-dense batteries has meant EVs have long been more expensive than their fossil fuel equivalents. But this could change faster than we thought. Economies of scale and new supplies of lithium make it possible to sell batteries more cheaply. And energy-dense, all-but-fireproof solid-state batteries will make possible EVs with a range of more than 1,200km per charge. We are, in short, at the beginning of the battery revolution.

  • New Cybersecurity Response Studio Wins $1.25M in Federal Funding

    A new Cybersecurity Incident Response Studio (CREST) at the University of Albany will bring cyber and crisis management researchers from across campus together to support training and simulation exercises for public, private and non-profit sector partners.

  • What You Need to Know About Audio Deepfakes

    Audio deepfakes have had a recent bout of bad press, but what receives less press are some of the uses of audio deepfakes that could actually benefit society. Nauman Dawalatabad explores ethical considerations, challenges in spear-phishing defense, and the optimistic future of AI-created voices across various sectors.

  • Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence

    Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.

  • Developing Safety Tools for Synthetic Biology to Defend Against Potential Misuse of AI

    Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help develop biotechnologies that can improve human health or that may increase harm. Organizations performing nucleic acid synthesis must be aware of AI-related risks and need guidance in identifying and mitigating those risks.

  • Falling Space Debris: How High Is the Risk I'll Get Hit?

    An International Space Station battery fell back to Earth and, luckily, splashed down harmlessly in the Atlantic. Should we have worried? Space debris reenters our atmosphere every week.

  • Prototype Self-Service Screening System Unveiled

    TSA and DHS S&T unveiled a prototype checkpoint technology, the self-service screening system, at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas, NV. The aim is to provide a near self-sufficient passenger screening process while enabling passengers to directly receive on-person alarm information and allow for the passenger self-resolution of those alarms.

  • Autonomous Vehicle Technology Vulnerable to Road Object Spoofing and Vanishing Attacks

    Researchers have demonstrated the potentially hazardous vulnerabilities associated with the technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, many autonomous vehicles use to navigate streets, roads and highways. The researchers have shown how to use lasers to fool LiDAR into “seeing” objects that are not present and missing those that are – deficiencies that can cause unwarranted and unsafe braking or collisions.

  • Testing Cutting-Edge Counter-Drone Technology

    Drones have many positive applications, bad actors can use them for nefarious purposes. Two recent field demonstrations brought government, academia, and industry together to evaluate innovative counter-unmanned aircraft systems.