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Humankind is confronted with a nuclear stewardship curse, facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to rejuvenate the nuclear energy industry to overcome the current dead-end in which it finds itself, and by force, humankind has trapped itself in. A 1% GDP investment over a decade in the main nuclear countries could boost economic growth with a focus on the real world, epitomised by nuclear physics/chemistry/engineering/economics with well defined targets. By investing vigorously to obtain scientific and technological breakthroughs, we can create the spring of a world economic rebound based on new ways of exploiting nuclear energy, both more safely and more durably.
During the second world war, Canada made several important contributions to the wartime work of the Manhattan Project. The three main contributions were: establishing a domestic nuclear research laboratory in Montreal to investigate heavy water reactors, creating supply chains to provide uranium oxide, heavy water and polonium to the Manhattan Project, and the direct contributions of several Canadians living the United States. These wartime efforts helped establish a legacy of nuclear research in Canada which has persisted to the present day.
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate the more that $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this survey, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including: charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.
Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous perturbations tend to exhibit a long phase of slow apparent stable evolution, which are nothing but slow maturations towards instabilities, failures and changes of regimes. With examples from history where a small event had a cataclysmic consequence, we propose a novel view of the current state of the world via the logical scenarios that derive, avoiding the traps of an illusionary stability and simple linear extrapolation. The endogenous scenarios are muddling along, managing through and blood red abyss. The exogenous scenarios are painful adjustment and golden east.
The NSF-sponsored Undergraduate ALFALFA Team (UAT) promotes long-term collaborative research opportunities for faculty and students from 23 U.S. public and private primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) within the context of the extragalactic ALFALFA HI blind legacy survey project. Over twelve project years of partnering with Arecibo and Green Bank Observatories, the UAT has had a demonstrable impact on the health of a legacy astronomy project, science education, and equity/inclusion in astronomy, with successful outcomes for 373 UAT students (39% women; ~30% members of underrepresented groups) and 34 faculty (44% women). The UAT model is adaptable to many large scientific projects and can be supported by relatively modest funding. We recommend that granting agencies identify funding resources to support the model, either as an add-on to legacy grant support or as a stand-alone funding source. This could include encouragement of UAT-like components in large scale projects currently being developed, such as the LSST and TMT. By doing this, we will recognize the high numbers of astronomy research-trained heavy-teaching-load faculty at PUIs as an under-utilized resource of the astronomy community (see also White Paper by Ribaudo et al.). These members of our community have the skills and the strong desire to contribute meaningfully to their field, as well as the ability to encourage and interact closely with many talented and motivated undergraduate students from all backgrounds.
Protecting embedded security is becoming an increasingly challenging research problem for embedded systems due to a number of emerging trends in hardware, software, networks, and applications. Without fundamental advances in, and an understanding of embedded security it will be difficult for future engineers to provide assurance for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) in wide ranging applications, from home automation and autonomous transportation to medical devices and factory floors. Common to such applications are cyberphysical risks and consequences stemming from a lack of embedded security. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a one-day visioning workshop to explore these issues. The workshop focused on five major application areas of embedded systems, namely (1) medical/wearable devices, (2) autonomous systems (drones, vehicles, robots), (3) smart homes, (4) industry and supply chain, and (5) critical infrastructure. This report synthesizes the results of that workshop and develops a list of strategic goals for research and education over the next 5-10 years. Embedded security in connected devices presents challenges that require a broad look at the overall systems design, including human and societal dimensions as well as technical. Particular issues related to embedded security are a subset of the overall security of the application areas, which must also balance other design criteria such as cost, power, reliability, usability and function. Recent trends are converging to make the security of embedded systems an increasingly important and difficult objective, requiring new trans-disciplinary approaches to solve problems on a 5-10 year horizon.