The Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued new grant guidelines that threaten to withhold counterterrorism funds from states that do not comply with President Donald Trump’s election security directives.
Twenty-six states accuse the Trump administration in a new lawsuit of illegally threatening to withhold billions in counterterrorism and emergency preparedness funds from states that don’t adopt sweeping election changes or cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Robots slithered like snakes into the rubble of collapsed buildings to search for trapped survivors in the aftermath of Venezuela’s double earthquake disaster.
The so-called snake robots represented a unique technological aid for international search and rescue efforts following two earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24, killing more than 5,000 people and leaving behind 16,740 injured. Rescuers from around the world used trained dogs, seismic and acoustic listening devices, video cameras on sticks, or thermal imaging cameras to search for signs of survivors—but the snakebots equipped with a video camera could squeeze through tight spaces to search deep within fallen building debris.
“The reason why snake robots are useful is they can get into tightly packed volumes that machinery and people otherwise cannot, and that's important in search and rescue because we were able to extend the visual reach of the rescue workers in a safe way,” Howie Choset, head of the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, told Ars. “In a sense, you're doing minimally invasive surgery on a structure with a snake robot.”
© Carnegie Mellon University
A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides a comprehensive assessment of the current capabilities of extreme event attribution (EEA) — a scientific field that analyzes whether and to what extent human-caused climate change influenced an individual ex
Communities that ask for federal assistance when climate disasters hit can’t count on that help to arrive. That increasingly common reality was reviewed in a recent report by Wisconsin Policy Forum, which focused on the historic floods in the state last August, finding that federal aid to help rebuild public infrastructure damaged by the record-breaking storms fell short of what was needed.
Flash flooding has been tearing up communities across the U.S., with heavy downpours sending creeks and rivers rushing over their banks from Texas to Kentucky, across the
There are a lot of ways for disaster victims to get help in the immediate aftermath of a flood or fire. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gives out temporary housing assistance and pays for debris removal, insurance companies pay to rebuild homes and replace lost valuables, and charity groups pass out food and water.
Droughts in the United States are becoming more intense and unpredictable, and the nation needs to develop a new drought assessment framework to better understand and address them, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Human-caused sea-level rise has significantly increased the frequency of extreme coastal flooding worldwide, according to a new study led by a Tulane University researcher.
The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that coastal flooding events expected only once every 100 years are now, on average, about 12 times more likely to occur.
France has been preparing for climate-fueled heat waves for more than two decades. In 2003, more than 14,800 people died as summer temperatures hovered above 95 degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks. The devastating event led French policymakers to build one of the world’s most comprehensive heat-resilience programs.
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