Short Takes – 9-8-23

Weapons: First New American Assault Rifle Since the 1960s. StrategyPage.com article. Pull quote: “The 6.8mm round is more accurate at longer ranges and has more hitting power than the 5.56mm round the M-16 was originally designed for. Out to about 600 meters, the 6.8mm round has about the same impact as the heavier 7.62mm round used in sniper rifles and medium machine-guns. It took longer to get a new 6.8mm rifle and LMG designed and built. The new ammunition and weapons are the first new ammo and weapons developed for the American infantry in over 60 years. This continues a trend that began nearly a century ago.”

CFATS Program Expires but Reauthorization Anticipated this Fall. TRCCompanies.com article. A bit of an advertorial. Pull quote: “It is important to keep up to date with your compliance program to avoid adverse impacts when CFATS is reauthorized. In addition to following regulatory developments, TRC can help you protect your facilities and operations with guidance on best approaches for securing your chemicals of interest. CFATS is a performance-based program and there are multiple security strategies that should be considered to find the optimum one for your facility.”

Here’s Something Past Its Expiration Date: the Expiration Date Itself. WSJ.com article. Pull quote: “U.S. consumers are wildly confused about the labels’ intent. In a 2019 paper, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University found 84% of consumers threw out food at the package date “at least occasionally” while 37% did so always or usually, though that wasn’t what most labels recommended. Over half thought date labeling was federally regulated, or were unsure. An earlier study found that 54% of people thought eating food past a sell-by date was unsafe.”

What Happens when People with Dementia Commit Crimes? ScientificAmerican.com article. Pull quote: “In the U.C.S.F. study that identified high rates of criminal behavior among people with dementia, those rates were highest among the subset of patients with FTD: 64 of 171 patients, or 37 percent. “Patients with FTD [Frontotemporal lobe dementia] can commit criminal violations while retaining the ability to know the moral rules and conventions,” Mendez wrote in a 2011 paper describing the predilection of people with FTD to break the law.”

More Efficient Battery Designed for Storing Energy from Wind or Solar Farms. HomelandSecurityNewswire.com article. Pull quote: ““Energy generation and energy consumption is always mismatched,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to have a device that can store that energy temporarily and release it when it’s needed.”” Link to technical article on the new battery.

How China gets free intel on tech companies’ vulnerabilities. ArsTechnica.com article. Pull quote: “The researchers found, in fact, that some firms appear to be taking that second option. They point to a July 2022 document posted to the account of a research organization within the Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies on the Chinese-language social media service WeChat. The posted document lists members of the Vulnerability Information Sharing program that “passed examination,” possibly indicating that the listed companies complied with the law. The list, which happens to focus on industrial control system (or ICS) technology companies, includes six non-Chinese firms: Beckhoff, D-Link, KUKA, Omron, Phoenix Contact, and Schneider Electric.”

The Rapid Intensification of Hurricane Lee Is a Warning. Wired.com article. Pull quote: “Putting it all together: To get rapid intensification, you need warm water, high humidity, and low wind shear. If you knock out any one of those variables, it’s a no-go. That’s what makes rapid intensification very rare. And even with all those variables lined up, rapid intensification isn’t a sure thing. “We don't have a deep understanding of the reason why we have this rapid intensification,” says University of Delaware atmospheric scientist Shuai Wang. “We can say: OK, now we have a high probability to have such events, but we are not sure whether or not it will happen.””