Security

Imagine a natural disaster scenario, such as an earthquake, that inflicts widespread damage to buildings and structures, critical utilities and infrastructure, and threatens human safety. Having the ability to navigate the rubble and enter highly unstable areas could prove invaluable to saving lives or detecting additional hazards among the wreckage. …

The threat of terrorism is not new to transportation. From jet airliners to mass transit buses and rail terminals, vehicles and transport facilities are all-too-familiar targets of terrorist attacks.   The 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway left 13 people dead and injured 6,000 others. The terror attack was …

Robots have already become an indispensable part of our lives. However currently, most robots are relatively rigid machines which make unnatural movements. In contrast, humans seem to be able to manipulate objects with our fingers with incredible ease like sifting through a bunch of keys in the dark, tossing and …

Electromagnetic waves in the millimeter-wave band  (with frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz, or wavelengths between 10 and 1.0 mm) have attractive characteristics. One of their features is the wider usable frequency band compared with waves in the microwave band or lower bands. Another feature of using the millimeter-wave band is the fact …

The US’s  GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) is a precision-guided munition weighing 21,500 pounds and was dropped from a C-130 Hercules aircraft. The MOAB isn’t the heaviest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal (that’s the 30,000-pound Massive Ordinance Penetrator ), but with a length of 30 feet and an …

The claims by Nigeria’s government that terrorist group Boko Haram has been “defeated” continue to ring hollow. An attack by the terrorist group on an army base  in Nov 2018 led to as many as 100 soldiers being killed, Reuters reports. The attack has been attributed to Islamic State West …

When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) deployed the Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) to support the complex communication and coordination needs of the multi-jurisdictional responders. Most of the operators provided with ATAK in Texas had never used it before. Still, …

EOD operators or ammunition technical officers conduct some of the military’s most dangerous jobs, who has the daunting task of dismantling, defusing and disposing bombs and other explosive ordnance, often in the most hostile and challenging of environments. Making this job safer  are bomb disposal robots, unmanned vehicles capable of disabling …

Synthetic identity theft is a type of fraud in which a criminal combines real and fake information to create a new identity, which is used to open fraudulent accounts and make fraudulent purchases. Fraudsters use this fictitious identity for obtaining credit, opening deposit accounts and obtaining driver’s licenses and passports. …

One of the threat of maritime security is human and drug smuggling across maritime borders. This is particularly important because terrorists may use similar pathways to sneak illegal weapons through the border or to deliver a dirty bomb to seaports.   There has been a noticeable growth in maritime criminal …