[Inter-Korea] :
North Korea and Russia have accused the United States and its allies of escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula, with Moscow expressing its full support of the North's measures against the United States. Pyongyang and Moscow released press statements on Saturday, a day after a strategic dialogue ...

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[Inter-Korea] :
North Korea is presumed to have used its KN-25 600-millimeter multiple rocket launch system to fire off short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea on Tuesday ahead of the U.S. presidential election. According to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff(JCS), the missiles appeared to have reached ...

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[Science] :
An international high-level government-civilian meeting opened in Seoul on Monday for discussions on the principles and regulations for artificial intelligence(AI) application in the military. According to Seoul's foreign and defense ministries, this is the Second Summit on Responsible AI in the ...

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[Science] :
Forensic authorities say last month’s electric vehicle fire in Incheon may have started with a battery pack under the car. The Incheon Metropolitan Police said the National Forensic Service delivered the assessment Friday, saying the battery pack may have caught fire and caused the car to burst into ...

[more...]

The poorest states in the U.S. often face a multitude of economic and social challenges that contribute to and perpetuate their low median household incomes.

Toothpaste is for cleaning your pearly whites, right? True, but there are other cool uses for it that you may not know about. Here are nine of them.

Actor Yoo Teo has been included in the 2024 version of Gold House's 'The A100' list.The list, announced every May, nominates 100 of the world's most impactful Asian Pacific leaders in American culture...

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Discover how the 7th House in astrology shapes love, partnerships, and marriage dynamics, revealing deep insights into relationship compatibility and commitment.

How we use drones  British Geological Survey

In powder diffraction, lattice symmetry relaxation causes a peak to split into several components which are not resolved if the degree of desymmetrization is small (pseudosymmetry). Here the equations which rule peak splitting are elaborated for the six minimal symmetry transitions, showing that the resulting split peaks are generally broader and asymmetric, and suffer an hkl-dependent displacement with respect to the high-symmetry parent peak. These results will be of help in Rietveld refinement of pseudosymmetric structures where an exact interpretation of peak deformation is required.

The management and processing of synchrotron and neutron computed tomography data can be a complex, labor-intensive and unstructured process. Users devote substantial time to both manually processing their data (i.e. organizing data/metadata, applying image filters etc.) and waiting for the computation of iterative alignment and reconstruction algorithms to finish. In this work, we present a solution to these problems: TomoPyUI, a user interface for the well known tomography data processing package TomoPy. This highly visual Python software package guides the user through the tomography processing pipeline from data import, preprocessing, alignment and finally to 3D volume reconstruction. The TomoPyUI systematic intermediate data and metadata storage system improves organization, and the inspection and manipulation tools (built within the application) help to avoid interrupted workflows. Notably, TomoPyUI operates entirely within a Jupyter environment. Herein, we provide a summary of these key features of TomoPyUI, along with an overview of the tomography processing pipeline, a discussion of the landscape of existing tomography processing software and the purpose of TomoPyUI, and a demonstration of its capabilities for real tomography data collected at SSRL beamline 6-2c.

The Keck-PAD (pixel array detector) was developed at Cornell as a burst-rate imager capable of recording images from successive electron bunches (153 ns period) from the Advanced Photon Source (APS). Both Si and hole-collecting Schottky CdTe have been successfully bonded to this ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) and used with this frame rate. The facility upgrades at the APS will lower the bunch period to 77 ns, which will require modifications to the Keck-PAD electronics to image properly at this reduced period. In addition, operation at high X-ray energies will require a different sensor material having a shorter charge collection time. For the target energy of 40 keV for this project, simulations have shown that electron-collecting CdTe should allow >90% charge collection within 35 ns. This collection time will be sufficient to sample the signal from one frame and prepare for the next. 750 µm-thick electron-collecting Schottky CdTe has been obtained from Acrorad and bonded to two different charge-integrating ASICs developed at Cornell, the Keck-PAD and the CU-APS-PAD. Carrier mobility has been investigated using the detector response to single X-ray bunches at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source and to a pulsed optical laser. The tests indicate that the collection time will meet the requirements for 77 ns imaging.

Diffuse scattering is a promising method to gain additional insight into protein dynamics from macromolecular crystallography experiments. Bragg intensities yield the average electron density, while the diffuse scattering can be processed to obtain a three-dimensional reciprocal-space map that is further analyzed to determine correlated motion. To make diffuse scattering techniques more accessible, software for data processing called mdx2 has been created that is both convenient to use and simple to extend and modify. mdx2 is written in Python, and it interfaces with DIALS to implement self-contained data-reduction workflows. Data are stored in NeXus format for software interchange and convenient visualization. mdx2 can be run on the command line or imported as a package, for instance to encapsulate a complete workflow in a Jupyter notebook for reproducible computing and education. Here, mdx2 version 1.0 is described, a new release incorporating state-of-the-art techniques for data reduction. The implementation of a complete multi-crystal scaling and merging workflow is described, and the methods are tested using a high-redundancy data set from cubic insulin. It is shown that redundancy can be leveraged during scaling to correct systematic errors and obtain accurate and reproducible measurements of weak diffuse signals.

Our study compares short-range order parameters refined from the diffuse scattering in single-crystal X-ray and single-crystal electron diffraction data. Nb0.84CoSb was chosen as a reference material. The correlations between neighbouring vacancies and the displacements of Sb and Co atoms were refined from the diffuse scattering using a Monte Carlo refinement in DISCUS. The difference between the Sb and Co displacements refined from the diffuse scattering and the Sb and Co displacements refined from the Bragg reflections in single-crystal X-ray diffraction data is 0.012 (7) Å for the refinement on diffuse scattering in single-crystal X-ray diffraction data and 0.03 (2) Å for the refinement on the diffuse scattering in single-crystal electron diffraction data. As electron diffraction requires much smaller crystals than X-ray diffraction, this opens up the possibility of refining short-range order parameters in many technologically relevant materials for which no crystals large enough for single-crystal X-ray diffraction are available.

It is pointed out that many authors are unaware that the particular choice of unit-cell origin determines the irreducible representations to which octahedral tilts in perovskites belong. Furthermore, a recommendation is made that the preferred option is with the origin at the B-cation site rather than that of the A site.

In this work, we showed that the use of ethanol to increase image contrast when imaging cardiac tissue with synchrotron X-ray phase-contrast imaging (X-PCI) leads to heterogeneous tissue shrinkage, which has an impact on the 3D organization of the myocardium.

Data collection at X-ray free electron lasers has particular experimental challenges, such as continuous sample delivery or the use of novel ultrafast high-dynamic-range gain-switching X-ray detectors. This can result in a multitude of data artefacts, which can be detrimental to accurately determining structure-factor amplitudes for serial crystallography or single-particle imaging experiments. Here, a new data-classification tool is reported that offers a variety of machine-learning algorithms to sort data trained either on manual data sorting by the user or by profile fitting the intensity distribution on the detector based on the experiment. This is integrated into an easy-to-use graphical user interface, specifically designed to support the detectors, file formats and software available at most X-ray free electron laser facilities. The highly modular design makes the tool easily expandable to comply with other X-ray sources and detectors, and the supervised learning approach enables even the novice user to sort data containing unwanted artefacts or perform routine data-analysis tasks such as hit finding during an experiment, without needing to write code.

Proteins are well known `shapeshifters' which change conformation to function. In crystallography, multiple conformational states are often present within the crystal and the resulting electron-density map. Yet, explicitly incorporating alternative states into models to disentangle multi-conformer ensembles is challenging. We previously reported the tool FLEXR, which, within a few minutes, automatically separates conformational signal from noise and builds the corresponding, often missing, structural features into a multi-conformer model. To make the method widely accessible for routine multi-conformer building as part of the computational toolkit for macromolecular crystallography, we present a graphical user interface (GUI) for FLEXR, designed as a plugin for Coot 1. The GUI implementation seamlessly connects FLEXR models with the existing suite of validation and modeling tools available in Coot. We envision that FLEXR will aid crystallographers by increasing access to a multi-conformer modeling method that will ultimately lead to a better representation of protein conformational heterogeneity in the Protein Data Bank. In turn, deeper insights into the protein conformational landscape may inform biology or provide new opportunities for ligand design. The code is open source and freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/TheFischerLab/FLEXR-GUI.

High-pressure crystallographic data can be measured using a diamond anvil cell (DAC), which allows the sample to be viewed only along a cell vector which runs perpendicular to the diamond anvils. Although centring a sample perpendicular to this direction is straightforward, methods for centring along this direction often rely on sample focusing, measurements of the direct beam or short data collections followed by refinement of the crystal offsets. These methods may be inaccurate, difficult to apply or slow. Described here is a method based on precise measurement of the offset in this direction using a confocal optical device, whereby the cell centre is located at the mid-point of two measurements of the distance between a light source and the external faces of the diamond anvils viewed along the forward and reverse directions of the cell vector. It is shown that the method enables a DAC to be centred to within a few micrometres reproducibly and quickly.

PayComplete has unveiled a report that...

"Red Band Society," premieres on Fox September 17th, starring Octavia Spencer, Charlie Rowe and Nolan Sotillo.; Credit: Fox Television Studios

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is pulling ads for the Fox television show "Red Band Society" from nearly 200 buses amid complaints they are racist and offensive to women.

The ads show the ensemble cast's members in front of a wall with graffiti describing their characters.

A denigrating word for a woman is used to describe the show's star, Octavia Spencer's character.

The Los Angeles Times reports transit officials began pulling the ads on Wednesday. They had been up for five weeks.

The Red Band Society also shared the ad on its Facebook page in August. 

Facebook: #RedBandSociety ad

But it's since edited it to look like this.

Photo: New ad via Facebook

Protesters who attended Thursday's transit agency board meeting complained the depiction of Spencer's character is racist and offensive to women.

The actress, who plays a nurse in the hospital drama, is black.

She won a supporting actress Oscar for her role in "The Help."

A fireworks stand, one of about 25 booths that are open for business, advertises on the first day of fireworks sales for Fourth of July celebrations June 28, 2005 in Fillmore, California.; Credit: David McNew/Getty Images

Every year in the days leading up to Independence Day, we’re flooded with public service announcements warning of the dangers and risks associated with fireworks. In LA County, where most fireworks are illegal, it can be even more dangerous as the area’s risk of fire grows. 

Today on AirTalk, we discuss the challenges in enforcing and responding to the use of illegal fireworks and the growing risks. We also want to hear from listeners. What was your Fourth of July experience like this year with fireworks? Do you think more needs to be done to crack down? Join the conversation by calling 866-893-5722.

We reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department, but the department was not able to accommodate our interview request and says updated data is unavailable at this time.

Guest:

Mike Feuer, Los Angeles city attorney; he tweets @Mike_Feuer

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Supporters of Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol. The House of Representatives is set to take up legislation Wednesday to create a select committee to investigate the insurrection.; Credit: Julio Cortez/AP

The House of Representatives is expected to take up legislation Wednesday to create a select committee to launch a new inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, marking the latest turn in a partisan fight to investigate the riot.

Senate Republicans blocked a move last month to vote on an outside commission, leaving Democratic leaders with plans to move forward with a House select committee instead. But some Republicans who supported the independent commission now say they'll oppose the select committee.

Already, several congressional committees have launched their own inquiries into the riot, which have run parallel to criminal investigations by the FBI that have led to more than 500 arrests connected to the breach of the Capitol.

"We hope to get to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth with respect to the events of Jan. 6," said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus. The committee would look into "what happened that fateful day, why it happened and how do we prevent that type of violent assault on the Capitol, the Congress, and the Constitution from ever happening again."

How the panel would work

The panel will face challenges confronted by other previous select committees, including the one formed by Republicans to look into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has not yet named the chair of the panel or the Democratic lawmakers she plans to tap to be on it.

The panel will have subpoena power and a total of 13 members, with eight selected by Pelosi and the remaining five by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. But Pelosi has not ruled out a veto of McCarthy's selections since the panel's resolution directs those appointments to be made with her consultation.

Pelosi has also signaled that she could use one of her eight picks to select a Republican. Quickly, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was recently ousted from her House leadership role by McCarthy and others, became a potential contender. Cheney hasn't ruled out the possibility, saying the final decision is Pelosi's.

For now, House Republicans, like Democrats, aren't saying who could be on the committee, but they are quick to slam the plan.

"If you look at the last vote (on the commission), it was overwhelmingly opposed by Republicans and what we've said is, look there are a lot of standing committees that have jurisdiction," House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said. "Speaker Pelosi should be exercising that same ability — not going down a partisan route."

But this time, Scalise and others could have more company to oppose the panel. Among them, Rep. John Katko of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, who helped broker the deal on the bipartisan commission with the committee's top Democrat, Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

On Tuesday, Katko called the panel a "turbo-charged partisan exercise," arguing it would be skewed with Democratic picks, with all 13 members ultimately selected by Pelosi. As a result, Katko said he'll vote no on the select committee and can't envision a scenario where he would serve on it.

"I led the charge to create a Jan. 6 commission that would be external, independent, bipartisan and equitable in membership and subpoena power," Katko said. "The select committee proposed by Speaker Pelosi is literally the exact opposite of that."

How a bipartisan commission failed

Pelosi announced the plans to move forward with the committee last week. It marked nearly a month after the Senate fell a few votes short to move forward with floor debate to take up bipartisan legislation to establish the independent commission to investigate the insurrection.

Six Republicans joined Democrats to move to debate, with a final Senate tally of 54 to 35, that fell short of the 60 votes needed to proceed. Earlier in May, the House approved the commission plan by a 252-175 vote, with 35 Republicans joining Democrats.

The legislation was modeled after the commission established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with a panel of commissioners divvied evenly between the parties and with bipartisan subpoena power.

Ahead of the votes, former President Donald Trump blasted the plan and asked GOP leaders to reject it. Both McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., followed suit, along with a majority of their party in both chambers.

Pelosi and other Democrats have blasted Republicans for blocking the move.

"They had an opportunity, and I don't think it should be lost on any of us that Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans turned this opportunity away to have a bipartisan, even-split commission," said Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, the chief deputy whip for House Democrats.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Gabriel Luna (L) and Robert Rodriguez attend the "Terminator: Dark Fate" Screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Slaughter Lane on October 29, 2019 in Austin, Texas. ; Credit: Gary Miller/Getty Images

Movie theaters are starting to reopen, and moviegoers are starting to return. All eight of the Laemmle’s theaters are now reopened, its Glendale location the last to do so a couple weeks ago. Tickets are now on sale for the first time in a year at American Cinematheque's Aero theater. 

Last weekend, “A Quiet Place: Part II” opened with very strong box office grosses. And one of the locations that sold a lot of tickets for the sequel was the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Los Angeles. The Texas-based boutique chain filed for bankruptcy reorganization in early March. Unlike the Arclight and Pacfic theaters, Alamo was able to come back quickly with many of its theaters reopening in May.

KPCC’s John Horn called up Tim League, Alamo’s founder and executive chairman, to talk about his circuit’s return, the future of moviegoing in a streaming era, and whether or not Alamo might be a buyer of the closed Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. 

Correction: The original broadcast said that American Cinematheque announced screenings at the Rialto Theater in South Pasadena, which was a mistake. 

With contributions from John Horn 

Guest: 

Tim League, founder and executive chairman of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Full Text:

National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers from North Carolina State and Elon universities have developed a technique that allows them to remotely control the movement of soft robots, lock them into position for as long as needed and later reconfigure the robots into new shapes. The technique relies on light and magnetic fields. "By engineering the properties of the material, we can control the soft robot's movement remotely; we can get it to hold a given shape; we can then return the robot to its original shape or further modify its movement; and we can do this repeatedly. All of those things are valuable, in terms of this technology's utility in biomedical or aerospace applications," says Joe Tracy, a professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work. In experimental testing, the researchers demonstrated that the soft robots could be used to form "grabbers" for lifting and transporting objects. The soft robots could also be used as cantilevers or folded into "flowers" with petals that bend in different directions. "We are not limited to binary configurations, such as a grabber being either open or closed," says Jessica Liu, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State. "We can control the light to ensure that a robot will hold its shape at any point."

Image credit: Jessica A.C. Liu

Cars make their way toward downtown Los Angeles on April 22. California could regain the right to set its own vehicle emissions standards after the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was moving to curb a Trump-era policy that sought to erode the state's previously-held power.; Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Monday it is preparing to restore California's right to set its own vehicle emissions standards, in a widely anticipated reversal of Trump-era policies.

The decision, which will take several months to be finalized, reaffirms the Golden State's powerful position as an environmental regulator after the Trump administration had in 2019 sought to remove California's powers to set its own emissions standards.

It also sets the stage for negotiations over how strict federal vehicle standards will be under President Biden.

"I am a firm believer in California's long-standing statutory authority to lead," EPA administration Michael Regan said in a statement.

"The 2019 decision to revoke the state's waiver to enforce its greenhouse gas pollution standards for cars and trucks was legally dubious and an attack on the public's health and wellbeing," he added.

The EPA will be accepting public comment until July 6 as part of the process of reversing the Trump-era rule.

The populous, car-loving state has been waging a battle against smog for decades.

And in recognition of that history, the EPA has long granted a waiver giving the state the authority to set its own standards for vehicle emissions, as long as they're more stringent than the national regulations.

That's an unusual exemption — other states can't set their own policies, although they can choose to adopt California's standards as their own.

Between California and the states that follow suit, about a third of the U.S. new car market is covered by the Golden State's policies, giving California regulators a remarkable amount of sway over the auto industry.

However, when the Trump administration weakened federal clean car standards, it also sought to revoke the waiver allowing California to set a higher bar.

That triggered a legal battle and divided the auto industry, with some carmakers choosing to side with California and voluntarily accept somewhat stricter vehicle emissions standards while the rest backed the Trump administration.

After Biden won the White House, every major automaker eventually dropped their support for the now-doomed Trump position.

The EPA has now started the process of reversing Trump's decision. The Department of Transportation last week also proposed to "wipe clean the regulatory slate," indicating that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would no longer seek to block state emissions standards, as it had under Trump.

It's still not clear what federal regulations on vehicle emissions and fuel economy will be under the Biden administration. Some environmental groups and progressive lawmakers are pushing for the reinstatement of the Obama-era standards, with more ambitious targets to follow.

The auto industry, meanwhile, is calling for standards midway between the Obama-era and Trump-era policies.

The EPA says it will propose new fuel economy rules in July.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

An American flag flies from a crane on July 4th next to the Champlain Towers South condo building, where scores of victims remain missing more than a week after it partially collapsed.; Credit: Lynne Sladky/AP

Preparations continue in Surfside, Fla. for the demolition of a portion of the Champlain Towers South still standing after much of the building collapsed in the early morning hours on June 24.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters on Sunday that bringing down the remainder of the collapsed condominium in a controlled fashion is crucial to the safety of search and rescue teams.

Those teams have paused their work so demolition can take place. Levine Cava said officials are still unsure of a specific time that the demolition will occur.

"Our top priority is that the building can come down as soon as possible — no matter what time that occurs — and safely as possible," Levine Cava said at a morning news conference.

The number of confirmed dead from the collapse remains at 24. The number of people unaccounted for remains at 121.

Preparations for the demolition come as Tropical Storm Elsa is tracking towards southern Florida. The storm is expected to hit the area Monday and Tuesday.

The instability of the building could be made worse by the storm, which is expected to bring strong winds and rain at the beginning of the week. Mayor Levine Cava said that as soon as the demolition has occurred, search and rescue efforts are expected to resume.

Ahead of Elsa's arrival in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a state of emergency Saturday for 15 counties, including Miami-Dade.

On Sunday, he expressed optimism that the Surfside area may be spared from the worst of the storm.

"We could see some gusts, but it has tracked west over the last day and a half — more so than the initial forecast," he said. "So, we'll just keep watching that."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Do you have any unwanted household products, such as paints, cleansers, solvents, antifreeze, batteries or used motor oils; or electronics like computer equipment, old radios, mobile phones, TVs, VCRs, calculators or copiers? Dispose of them properly, free of charge, on May 7th from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The County was recognized for implementation of a Building Permit QR Codes system, which provides building contractors and inspectors with up-to-the-minute job site and inspection information, at their fingertips, in the field.

Catawba County has won the Government Innovation Grant Award (GIGA), from the UNC School of Government, the Local Government Federal Credit Union, and the North Carolina Local Government Information Systems Association, for its innovative use of Quick Response (QR) Codes on building permits issued in the county. The County was recognized for implementation of a Building Permit QR Codes system, which provides building contractors and inspectors with up-to-the-minute job site and inspection information, at their fingertips, in the field.

A new agreement extends borrowing privileges at Lenoir-Rhyne University Library to registered users of Hickory Public and Catawba County Libraries.

Bacteria that resist antibiotics can be passed from food animals to humans, but not enough is known to determine the public health risks posed by such transmission, says a new report by a committee of the National Research Council.

Scientific evidence is insufficient to prove or disprove the theory that exposure to polio vaccine contaminated with a monkey virus between 1955 and 1963 has triggered cancer in humans, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

A preponderance of scientific evidence shows that even low doses of ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays and X-rays, are likely to pose some risk of adverse health effects, says a new report from the National Academies National Research Council.

Use of protective face coverings will be one of many strategies used to slow or prevent transmission of the flu virus in the event of a pandemic, even though scientific evidence about the effectiveness of inexpensive, disposable medical masks and respirators against influenza is limited.

Although most people who receive and manage Social Security benefits on behalf of other individuals perform their duties well.

Good morning. I am Dr. Alice Gast and I am here today with Dr. David Relman as the chair and vice chair of the Committee on the Review of the Scientific Approaches Used During the FBI’s Investigation of the 2001 Bacillus anthracis Mailings.

Each year, tens of millions of Americans, young and old, choose to learn about science in informal ways -- by visiting museums and aquariums, attending after-school programs, pursuing personal hobbies, and watching TV documentaries, for example.

A new report from the National Research Council examines and, when possible, estimates hidden costs of energy production and use.

A National Research Council committee asked to examine the scientific approaches used and conclusions reached by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during its investigation of the 2001 Bacillus anthracis mailings has determined that it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the anthrax in letters mailed to New York City and Washington, D.C., based solely on the available scientific evidence.

An analysis of more than 1,000 research articles concluded that few health problems are caused by or clearly associated with vaccines.

Current federal tax provisions have minimal net effect on greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report from the National Research Council.

Rates of physical and sexual abuse of children have declined over the last 20 years, but for reasons not fully understood, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Yet, reports of psychological and emotional child abuse have risen in the same period, and data vary significantly as to whether child neglect is increasing, decreasing, or remaining constant.

The analysis used by federal agencies to set standards for fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions for new U.S. light-duty vehicles -- passenger cars and light trucks -- from 2017 to 2025 was thorough and of high caliber overall, says a new report from the National Research Council.

Efforts to convert civilian research reactors from weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuels are taking significantly longer than anticipated, says a congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should lead efforts among federal partners and stakeholders to design, implement, and evaluate a multipronged, evidence-based national strategy to reduce stigma toward people with mental and substance use disorders, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Although the current supply of molybdenum-99 and technetium-99m – isotopes used worldwide in medical diagnostic imaging – is sufficient to meet domestic and global demand, changes to the supply chain before year-end could lead to severe shortages and impact the delivery of medical care, says a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Rising levels of noise in the ocean have been identified as a growing concern for the well-being of marine mammals, but other threats such as pollution, climate change, and prey depletion by fisheries may also harm marine mammals and influence their response to additional noise.

Several strong earthquakes around the world have resulted in a phenomenon called soil liquefaction, the seismic generation of excess porewater pressures and softening of granular soils, often to the point that they may not be able to support the foundations of buildings and other infrastructure.

Recent scientific and technological advances have the potential to improve assessment of public health risks posed by chemicals, yet questions remain how best to integrate the findings from the new tools and methods into risk assessment.