• Hydropower’s Evolving Value to the Grid and Energy Storage

    Across the United States, hydroelectric dams are capturing energy from river water to create electricity that powers everything from street lights to mega industrial plants. Hydropower represents 41 percent of all renewable energy generated across the nation and is a key element of a flexible, resilient electric grid. But in some parts of the country, operations at dams are changing.

  • Tracking Drones in Urban Settings

    As drones become more popular and more worrisome from a security standpoint, many projects have sought to engineer systems to spot them. Engineers are using machine learning and radar to detect drones in complicated urban settings.

  • Claims of Microwave Attacks Are Scientifically Implausible

    Allegations about microwave attacks on U.S. personnel have been reported regularly, some going back decades. The recent wave of reports started in 2016, with reports from the American and Canadian diplomatic missions in Havana, hence the name “Havana syndrome.” “Here’s the problem,” Cheryl Rofer writes. “Aside from the reported syndromes, there’s no evidence that a microwave weapon exists—and all the available science suggests that any such weapon would be wildly impractical. It’s possible that the symptoms of all the sufferers of Havana syndrome share a single, as yet unknown, cause; it’s also possible that multiple real health problems have been amalgamated into a single syndrome.”

  • Protecting Critical Energy Infrastructure

    Increasingly, both Israel and the U.S. face costly cyberattacks that can cause severe damage to critical energy infrastructure. A new consortium will develop, integrate, and test technologies, and demonstrate high value cyberattack mitigation technologies on the energy infrastructure, using data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

  • Experts Evaluate Planetary Defense Methods

    Scientists are working to develop methods to prevent asteroids from wreaking havoc on Earth. “We know that currently, the U.S. has many knowledge and capability gaps for planetary defense readiness,” says one expert.. “The work we are doing today, and the opportunity to discuss that work with the broader international community at venues like the IAA Planetary Defense Conference (PDC), is helping to close these gaps.”

  • How Can Scientists Predict a COVID-19 Outbreak? There Is an App for That

    A mobile app that uses crowd-sourced data on COVID-19 symptoms can accurately identify where local coronavirus outbreaks will appear, according to scientists who developed the app. “COVID Control” using self-reported virus symptom information could predict next outbreak.

  • Turning Technology against Human Traffickers

    Last October, the White House released the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking. The plan was motivated, in part, by a greater understanding of the pervasiveness of the crime. This increasing awareness has also motivated MIT Lincoln Laboratory to harness its technological expertise toward combating human trafficking.

  • Sarcasm Detector for Online Communications

    Sentiment analysis – the process of identifying positive, negative, or neutral emotion – across online communications has become a growing focus for both commercial and defense communities. Sentiment can be an important signal for online information operations to identify topics of concern or the possible actions of bad actors. The presence of sarcasm – a linguistic expression often used to communicate the opposite of what is said with an intention to insult or ridicule – in online text is a significant hindrance to the performance of sentiment analysis.

  • Improving Grid Reliability in the Face of Extreme Events

    The nation’s power grid remains vulnerable to disruption from extreme events including wildfires, severe storms, and cyberattacks. Variable generation resources and load volatility also present operational challenges to grid stability. To mitigate disruptions before they snowball, grid planners and operators must be able to see these events coming and understand their potential impacts on grid reliability.

  • An Uncrackable Combination of Invisible Ink and Artificial Intelligence

    Coded messages in invisible ink sound like something only found in espionage books, but in real life, they can have important security purposes. Yet, they can be cracked if their encryption is predictable. Now, researchers have printed complexly encoded data with normal ink and a carbon nanoparticle-based invisible ink, requiring both UV light and a computer that has been taught the code to reveal the correct messages.

  • Addressing the Thin Data Problem in National Security

    When a data set is too small to be used to make a decision, the solution is usually obvious: Get more data! That’s the cry of analysts everywhere, whether the need is to confirm the safety of a vaccine or to pinpoint an annoying knock in a car’s engine. But, says one expert, “In national security, oftentimes there is not better data. There is not more data. We need new techniques to understand the data we do have, to extract more meaning from the information already in hand.”

  • Nuclear Micro-Reactors

    The idea of a nuclear power plant today evokes images of large cooling towers and expansive, warehouse-size buildings. Such facilities generate about a fifth of electricity in the United States without emitting greenhouse gases. A different picture of nuclear energy is emerging, however, in the form of micro-reactors that could fit on the back of a truck or inside a rocket to space. The promise of these micro-reactors is to provide the same reliable, zero-carbon power in remote settings or to support electrical power grid recovery.

  • Entire U.S. West Coast Now Has Access to ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning

    After fifteen years of planning and development, the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system is now available to more than fifty million people in California, Oregon and Washington, the most earthquake-prone region in the conterminous U.S.

  • Keeping Automated Electric Vehicles Safe

    Having your social media account hacked is a pain. Having your credit card account hacked can be devastating. Having your new electric vehicle hacked could be disastrous. As the move toward automated electric cars accelerates, protecting the cybersecurity of these vehicles has become urgent.

  • Breakthrough Technology a Game Changer for Deepfake Detection

    Army researchers developed a deepfake detection method that will allow for the creation of state-of-the-art soldier technology to support mission-essential tasks such as adversarial threat detection and recognition. This work specifically focuses on a lightweight, low training complexity and high-performance face biometrics technique that meets the size, weight and power requirements of devices soldiers will need in combat.