• 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.

  • 3 Questions: Modeling Adversarial Intelligence to Exploit AI’s Security Vulnerabilities

    MIT Principal Research Scientist Una-May O’Reilly discusses how she develops agents that reveal AI models’ security weaknesses before hackers do.

  • DeepSeek: How a Small Chinese AI Company Is Shaking Up U.S. Tech Heavyweights

    For consumers, access to AI may also become cheaper. For researchers who already have a lot of resources, more efficiency may have less of an effect. It is unclear whether DeepSeek’s approach will help to make models with better performance overall, or simply models that are more efficient.

  • DeepSeek Shatters Beliefs About the Cost of AI, Leaving U.S. Tech Giants Reeling

    Society may benefit from less computationally intensive, and therefore more energy-efficient, AI. However, the geopolitical risk of a single country capturing the market, together with concerns about data privacy, intellectual property and censorship may outweigh the benefits.

  • 5 Israeli Innovations for Fighting Wildfires

    As regions from California to the Mediterranean face wildfire threats, these innovations can help win the battle against out-of-control flames.

  • Monitoring Space Traffic

    AeroAstro Ph.D. student Sydney Dolan uses an interdisciplinary approach to develop collision-avoidance algorithms for satellites.