• Forensic Analysis of Lipstick Trace

    Forensic scientists find a new way of identifying brands of lipstick at a crime scene without removing evidence from its bag.

  • Deep Learning Helps Predict Traffic Crashes Before They Happen

    A deep model was trained on historical crash data, road maps, satellite imagery, and GPS to enable high-resolution crash maps that could lead to safer roads.

  • New Treatment Technology Could Reduce Nuclear Waste Burden

    Researchers have developed a novel treatment technology that may help to significantly reduce the burden of nuclear waste. This breakthrough could therefore significantly speed up disposal of such material and reduce the overall cost of dealing with our legacy waste.

  • Earthquake System Model with Better Detection Capabilities

    researchers developed a machine learning model that improves the accuracy of detecting earthquakes by 14.5 percent compared to the most accurate current existing model.

  • Nuclear Physics Used to probe Floridan Aquifer Threatened by Climate Change

    Florida is known for water. Between its beaches, swamps, storms and humidity, the state is soaked. And below its entire surface lies the largest freshwater aquifer in the nation. As rising sea levels threaten coastal areas, scientists are using an emerging nuclear dating technique to track the ins and outs of water flow.

  • Hydrogen Can Play Key Role in U.S. Decarbonization

    “Hydrogen is not really an energy source. It is rather an energy carrier or what we often call an energy vector,” says Berkeley Lab’s Ahmet Kusoglu. “So, you have to produce hydrogen from another energy source, store it, and then use or convert it. Hydrogen is a versatile and flexible energy carrier because it can be produced from various sources and for different applications. This flexibility is a key benefit of hydrogen versus other hydrocarbon fuels or energy storage technologies like batteries.”

  • Disrupting Asteroids to Protect the Earth

    If an asteroid is on an Earth-impacting trajectory, scientists typically want to stage a deflection, where the asteroid is gently nudged by a relatively small change in velocity, while keeping the bulk of the asteroid together. Researchers have examined how different asteroid orbits and different fragment velocity distributions affect the fate of the fragments, using initial conditions from a hydrodynamics calculation, where a 1-Megaton-yield device was deployed a few meters off the surface of a 100-meter diameter asteroid.

  • Safe Airspace in the Age of Drones

    Drones are becoming more and more ubiquitous, and are being used for everything from backyard fun to military operations. As the technologies for UAS continues to improve, so has the potential for them to be used in illegal and dangerous ways.

  • Innovative Air Domain Awareness Technology

    DHS S&T is evaluating an innovative air domain awareness technologies to help protect the airspace along our northern border with Canada.

  • Apps for Popular Smart Home Devices Contain Security Flaws

    As Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as connected locks, motion sensors, security cameras and smart speakers become increasingly ubiquitous in households across the country, their surging popularity means more people are at risk of cyber intrusions. Researchers have found that the smartphone companion applications of 16 popular smart home devices contain “critical cryptographic flaws” that could allow attackers to intercept and modify their traffic.

  • Why It Matters That North Korea Tested a Hypersonic Missile

    Like most ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicle (HGVs) fly at hypersonic speeds, or faster than five times the speed of sound. But HGVs are in theory more difficult to detect and intercept, since they can fly at relatively low altitudes and be maneuvered in flight.

  • U.S. and EU, Wary of China, Forge Alliance on Technology

    With Beijing on the rise as a tech superpower, Brussels and Washington want to close ranks. But divisions loom over the new “Trade and Technology Council” alliance — and previous efforts have a mixed track record.

  • Powerful Clean Energy Available in Our Oceans

    Marine energy—clean power generated from ocean currents, waves, tides, and water temperature changes—is still young, but it has the potential to deliver clean, renewable electricity to coastal communities where nearly 40 percent of Americans live. Before that can happen, scientists need to pinpoint which oceanic arteries host the most reliable energy.

  • Lowering the High Cost of Desalination

    Removing salt and other impurities from sea-, ground- and wastewater could solve the world’s looming freshwater crisis. A suite of analytical tools makes it easier for innovators to identify promising research directions in making saltwater potable.

  • Harnessing Drones, Geophysics and Artificial Intelligence to Remove Land Mines

    Mines and other unexploded ordinance are a worldwide menace; about 100 million devices are thought to be currently scattered across dozens of countries. Aside from putting both wartime and postwar areas off limits to travel, agriculture or anything else, they caused at least 5,500 recorded casualties in 2019; totals in many previous years have been much higher. Some 80 percent of the victims are civilians, and of those, nearly half are children.