Global Biodefense June 14, 2022 The NIH will hold a virtual stakeholder engagement meeting on the United States government’s policies for the oversight of life sciences dual use research of concern (DURC) on June 29, 2022. DURC provides knowledge, information, products, or technologies that could be directly misapplied to pose a significant threat with broad potential consequences to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, materiel, or national security. USG Policy for Oversight aims to preserve the benefits of life sciences research while minimizing the risk that the knowledge, information, products, or technologies generated by […]
Tag Archives: National security
US approach to research security threatens scientific enterprise, says new report
Phys.org December 20, 2021 According to a new report by the American Physical Society (APS) titled “Impact of US Research Security Policies: US Security and the Benefits of Open Science and International Collaborations,” the US federal government’s current approach to research security concerns is causing a significant number of researchers to feel unwelcome in the United States, leading them to consider taking their talents to other countries. For the US to remain a global leader in science and technology, the nation must provide an environment that encourages open science and the free exchange of information and be a destination of choice […]
Agreement brings Soldiers, academia together to solve military challenges
EurekAlert June 8, 2021 Under a new Congressional initiative called the Catalyst-Pathfinder program the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command partners with the XVIII Airborne Corps to create close working relationships between Soldiers and universities to solve military challenges. The goal is to harness the creativity and technical skills of academic institutions and help the Army to quickly create better solutions to real problems. Catalyst frames Soldier problems in a manner suitable for academia to identify research and emerging technologies to solve them. Pathfinder executes pilot programs, rapidly accelerating the delivery of technologies to address complex Army problems. Universities in […]
Shadow figment technology foils cyberattacks
Science Daily June 2, 2021 Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have created a cybersecurity technology called Shadow Figment which uses artificial intelligence to deploy elaborate deception to keep attackers engaged in a pretend world — the figment — that mirrors the real world. The decoy interacts with users in real time, responding in realistic ways to commands. It rewards hackers with false signals of success, keeping them occupied while defenders learn about the attackers’ methods and take actions to protect the real system. The credibility of the deception relies on a machine learning program that learns from observing […]
Researchers examine record-shattering 2020 trans-Atlantic dust storm
Phys.org May 26, 2021 For two weeks in June 2020, a massive dust plume from Saharan Africa crept westward across the Atlantic, blanketing the Caribbean and Gulf Coast states in the U.S. Researchers at the University of Kansas used satellite datasets to reconstruct the patterns that transported the dust from Africa to the Americas. According to the researchers the extreme trans-Atlantic dust event is associated with both enhanced dust emissions over western North Africa and atmospheric circulation extremes that favor long-range dust transport. An exceptionally strong African easterly jet and associated wave activities export African dust across the Atlantic toward […]
Climate change threatens one-third of global food production
Phys.org May 14, 2021 Although it is widely accepted that climate change perturbs food productions, no systematic understanding exists on where and how the major risks for entering unprecedented conditions may occur. An international team of researchers (Finland, Switzerland) has addressed this gap by introducing the concept of safe climatic space (SCS), which incorporates the decisive climatic factors of agricultural production: precipitation, temperature, and aridity. They showed that a rapid and unhalted growth of greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5–8.5) could force 31% of the global food crop and 34% of livestock production beyond the SCS by 2081–2100. The most vulnerable areas […]
Nuclear terrorism could be intercepted by neutron-gamma detector that pinpoints source
EurekAlert May 19, 2021 Researchers in Sweden have developed a Neutron-Gamma Emission Tomography (NGET) system that goes beyond the capabilities of existing radiation portal monitors, by measuring the time and energy correlations between particles emitted in nuclear fission and using machine learning algorithms to visualize where they are coming from. The system looks for coincidences of neutron and gamma ray emissions–which when mapped together in real-time allow pinpointing their origin. They demonstrated the method on a radiation portal monitor prototype system based on fast organic scintillators measuring the characteristic fast time and energy correlations between particles emitted in nuclear fission […]
Researchers shed light on the evolution of extremist groups
EurekAlert May 19, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (George Washington University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, industry) compared the growth of the Boogaloos, a new and increasingly prominent U.S. extremist movement, to the growth of online support for ISIS, a militant, terrorist organization based in the Middle East to understand any system-level commonalities in the ways these movements emerge and grow. They showed that the early dynamics of these two online movements follow the same mathematical order despite their stark differences and the evolution of both movements, across scales, follows a single shockwave equation that accounts for heterogeneity […]
Ocean bacteria release carbon into the atmosphere
Science Daily April 12, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (University of Minnesota Twin-Cities, Boston University, Harvard University) discovered that deep-sea bacteria dissolve carbon-containing rocks, releasing excess carbon into the ocean and atmosphere. They studied sulfur-oxidizing bacteria — a group of microbes that use sulfur as an energy source — in methane seeps on the ocean floor. The seeps contain collections of limestone that trap large amounts of carbon. The sulfur-oxidizing microbes live on top of these rocks, in the process of oxidizing sulfur, the bacteria create an acidic reaction that dissolves the rocks. This releases the carbon […]
Widening political rift in U.S. may threaten science, medicine
Science Daily March 22, 2021 According to a team of researchers in the US (Washington University, Stanford University), in the United States, the wide ideological divergence in public confidence in science poses a potentially significant problem for the scientific enterprise. They examined the behavioral consequences of this ideological divide for Americans’ contributions to medical research. Based on a mass survey of American adults, they found that engagement in a wide range of medical research activities is a function of a latent propensity to participate. The propensity is systematically higher among liberals than among conservatives. A substantial part of this ideological […]