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Temporary Accommodation, Affordable Modular Housing Can Help Communities Recover from Natural Disasters
The scale of the wildfires which swept through Los Angeles, leaving a trail of devastation and destroying thousands of homes, underscores the urgent need for rapid and sustainable housing that supports displaced people and their families in times of crisis. One promising approach is modular housing.
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Security Scheme Could Protect Sensitive Data During Cloud Computation
MIT researchers crafted a new approach that could allow anyone to run operations on encrypted data without decrypting it first.
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Belief in AI as a 'Great Machine' Could Weaken National Security Crisis Responses: Study
New research indicated that emergency management and national security professionals were more hesitant and doubtful of their abilities when faced with completely AI-driven threats.
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Robot with LiDAR Laser Explores Danger Zones
In a disaster such as a chemical plant incident or flooding, emergency services need ways to quickly get an overview of the situation. But in many cases, they are not permitted to enter the scene itself in order to avoid putting themselves at risk.
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Avalanche Detection Using Passive Radar
In winter, avalanches pose the biggest danger in mountains. Avalanche monitoring is therefore of critical importance to ensure the safety of people and infrastructure.
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South Korea Has Acted Decisively on DeepSeek. Other Countries Must Stop Hesitating
South Korea has suspended new downloads of DeepSeek, and it was right to do so. Chinese tech firms operate under the shadow of state influence, misusing data for surveillance and geopolitical advantage. Any country that values its data and sovereignty must watch this national security threat and take note of South Korea’s response.
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The Push to Restore Semiconductor Manufacturing Faces a Labor Crisis − Can the U.S. Train Enough Workers in Time?
Semiconductors power nearly every aspect of modern life.The U.S. depends heavily on foreign countries – including China, a geopolitical rival – to manufacture semiconductors. This isn’t just an economic concern; it’s widely recognized as a national security risk. There is a bipartisan support to expanding domestic chip manufacturingby building new chip plants, but a major challenge remains: Who will operate them?
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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.
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Security Veins: Advanced Biometric Authentication Through AI and Infrared
Hyperspectral imaging and AI can identify individuals using blood vessels in palms.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.