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MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was killed in a shooting at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts Monday night, the school confirmed. Loureiro, a nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal, was 47 years old. A Brookline police spokesperson said officers responded to a call for gunshots at an apartment on Gibbs Street at about 8:30 p.m. "A victim was located who had been shot multiple times," Brookline police deputy superintendent Paul Campbell told WBZ-TV. Loureiro was taken by ambulance to a Boston hospital, where he died Tuesday morning. No other information about the shooting was immediately released and authorities did not...

(Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a new strategy in the quest to harness fusion to produce electricity: combining two existing methods of managing plasma to allow greater overall flexibility. The PPPL team’s new dual approach brings together electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) methods with resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP), marking the first time a simulation showing how they can be used together could facilitate greater control of plasma during fusion reactions. In simple terms, fusion produces energy by replicating the natural processes occurring on the surface of...

The Obama administration has lifted longtime restrictions on Libyans attending flight schools in the United States and training here in nuclear science, according to a final amendment of the ban recently approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The AI models were prone to safety failures and discrimination, a new study found. Robots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are not safe for general use, according to a new study. Researchers from the United Kingdom and United States evaluated how AI-driven robots behave when they are able to access people’s personal data, including their race, gender, disability status, nationality, and religion. For their study, which was published in International Journal of Social Robots, they ran tests on how the AI models behind popular chatbots – including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral AI – would...

We have to start counting from 1 again... ======================================================== Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * While most estimates place the current human population at around 8.2 billion, a study suggests we might be vastly underrepresenting rural areas. * By analyzing 300 rural dam projects across 35 countries, researchers from Aalto University in Finland found discrepancies among these independent population counts and other population data gathered between 1975 and 2010. * Such underreporting could have consequences in terms of resource allocation within a country, but other experts remain skeptical that decades of population counting could be off...

A groundbreaking study reveals that human activities have pushed Earth's biosphere to a critical tipping point, threatening the planet's ability to sustain life and prompting urgent calls for immediate global action. The integrity of Earth’s biosphere is under unprecedented threat, according to a recent study that sheds light on the planet’s declining ability to maintain ecological balance. Conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and BOKU University in Vienna, the research highlights critical challenges facing the plant kingdom’s capacity to regulate essential ecosystem functions. The study, published in the journal One Earth, examines the energy flows derived...

The annual clock of the seasons – winter, spring, summer, autumn – is often taken as a given. But our new study in Nature, using a new approach for observing seasonal growth cycles from satellites, shows that this notion is far too simple. We present an unprecedented and intimate portrait of the seasonal cycles of Earth's land-based ecosystems. This reveals "hotspots" of seasonal asynchrony around the world – regions where the timing of seasonal cycles can be out of sync between nearby locations. .....

China’s Ministry of State Security Directed the Theft of COVID-19 Research and the Exploitation of Microsoft Exchange Server Vulnerabilities, Known Publicly as the Indiscriminate ‘HAFNIUM’ Intrusion CampaignThe Justice Department announced today that Xu Zewei (徐泽伟), 33, of the People’s Republic of China was arrested on July 3 in Italy at the request of the United States. Xu and his co-defendant, PRC national Zhang Yu (张宇), 44, are charged in a nine-count indictment, unsealed today in the Southern District of Texas, for their involvement in computer intrusions between February 2020 and June 2021, including the indiscriminate HAFNIUM computer intrusion campaign that...

Thousands of enraged Iranians burned the US flag and chanted “death to America” and “Israel” Saturday as the Islamic Republic buried the head of its armed forces and other top commanders who were killed during the 12-day war. The caskets of about 60 corpses, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s chief Generals Hossein Salami and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, were marched through the streets of downtown Tehran for the first public funerals since President Trump helped broker a June 23 cease-fire between the two Middle Eastern countries. “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” the crowds screamed as flags of both countries...

The Trump administration has secretly launched an intensive vetting process for hundreds of foreign scientists brought into the United States from "countries of concern" like China, using visas procured with the help of the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies, officials told Just the News. The review involving intelligence and security agencies began weeks ago over concerns prior administrations did not adequately vet the backgrounds of scientists or their ties to actors like China's military or its Communist Party. But the initiative has taken on additional urgency after three Chinese scientists were arrested in the last month...

Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed by a robot, The New York Times reported Saturday. Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in November 2020, and initial reports claimed he was gunned down by a remote-controlled machine gun. According to the new Times report, the gun was planted in a pickup truck by Iranian agents, and operated by a Mossad sniper working on a computer located outside Iran. The newspaper also said that the gun was a beta test of a weapon "kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute." The truck itself...

WASHINGTON -- Just when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it had its hands around the Iranian nuclear program, NewsMax has learned from intelligence sources that Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps is completing a secret, underground uranium enrichment plant that should begin operating in October 2006. Work on the new plant, located 50 miles outside the northeastern Iranian city of Mashad, was begun with help from Russian engineers in 2003, Iranian intelligence sources said. The facility has been built 150 meters below ground in a rugged highlands valley some 38 kilometers southeast of the city of Nishabour. The nearest inhabited...

In a striking twist, the operation targeting Iran’s nuclear scientists is known as "Narnia" in Israel, a name that reflects the operation’s improbable nature. Israel’s Mossad operation to eliminate Iranian’s top nuclear scientists is named “Operation Narnia.”

As they pounded the Iranian nuclear facilities yesterday, the Israelis were finally doing what so many Western leaders had expected they would do for years, if not decades. In fact, let us be honest: the rest of the world has not just been expecting this Israeli action. Secretly or openly, many governments have been hoping for it. In one astonishing operation the Israelis crippled the Natanz enrichment reactor and seriously damaged two others. They took out six of the most important Iranian nuclear scientists, as well as an astonishing array of the country’s top brass. They blew up radars and...

Two Chinese scientists accused of smuggling or shipping biological material into the United States for use at the University of Michigan will remain in custody after waiving their right to a hearing Friday in federal court. Yunqing Jian and Chengxuan Han said in separate court appearances in Detroit that they would not challenge the government’s request to keep them locked up while their cases move forward. “This is a constantly evolving situation involving a large number of factors,” Han’s attorney, Sara Garber, told a judge. She didn’t elaborate and later declined to comment. Han was arrested Sunday at Detroit Metropolitan...

America is at risk of losing a generation of scientists. Amid sweeping cuts to federal research funding by the Trump administration, job opportunities for young scientists are being rescinded, postdoctoral positions eliminated and fellowships folded as labs struggle to afford new researchers. As countless scientific projects come to a halt, the researchers who will suffer the most are those just beginning their careers. Times Opinion has heard from more than 100 readers who have shared stories of how they’ve been affected. Kristen Gram is a 22-year-old graduate student researching the type of materials and hardware that might one day help...

DARPA scientist Joshua Elliott, the documents show. He was a DARPA program manager from 2017 to 2023, according to his LinkedIn. Beforehand, he studied things like “socio-technical change,” and worked in academia for 10 years on things like “computational climate economics.” At DARPA, he was allowed to “program” $600 million in federal research and development funding, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Afterward, Elliott worked for the radical group Quadrature Climate Foundation, and more recently, Renaissance

Losses include leading lights in AI, drones, defence, semiconductors and aerospace technologyChina has lost some of its most prominent scientists and engineers over the past few years in what have officially been deemed deaths due to accidental circumstances or natural causes. But the sudden departures of the key figures – many of whom worked in fields tied to national security and technological advancement – have also raised questions about the safety and security of the China’s most valuable intellectual assets. Despite lingering public concerns, no evidence has emerged that suggests any of these cases were related to national security...

An asteroid with the power to unleash an explosion one hundred times greater than an atomic bomb has triggered global space agency alarms. The odds that the space rock dubbed Y4, which is nearly the size of a football field at between 130 and 300 feet wide, could hit Earth is now too close to ignore, they warn. “If you put it over Paris or London or New York, you basically wipe out the whole city and some of the environs,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, told Agence France-Presse last week. The asteroid was first observed on...

Virologist Beata Halassy says self-treatment worked and was a positive experience — but researchers warn that it is not something others should try.Viruses such as measles (pictured here) can be used to attack cancerous cells. Credit: Eye Of Science/Science Photo Library A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, aged 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence there since her left breast had been removed, and she...