The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that in the United States, up to 30-40 percent of the food supply is wasted. Food waste occurs due to many factors, whether from issues at the milling, drying, and transportation challenges at the farm level or storage malfunctions or over ordering issues at the retail level, to name a few. To help combat food loss, the USDA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set a goal in 2015 to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

The past 20 years have seen numerous epidemics break out across the globe: SARS, H1N1, Ebola, Zika, and most recently, COVID-19. These diseases have impacted the lives of billions, and have caused millions of deaths around the world. A multitude of factors can cause an infectious disease to develop and spread, including climate and poor sanitation, but even with knowledge of these factors it is difficult to predict when outbreaks will occur.

It has been said that “seeing is believing,” but in the age of social media, viral videos, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, can we truly believe what we see on the internet? Computer science researchers at the University of Maryland have invented a “Deepfake Detection Tool” to help answer that question.

While a doctoral student researching Black performance and the civil rights movement, Assistant Professor of English Julius Fleming, Jr. discovered a newspaper article about a 1964 performance of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in the Mississippi Delta. At this performance, the article notes, was acclaimed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who connected the play's plot line—two characters waiting for a person who never comes—to Black Americans' perpetual wait for freedom.

A bill passed by the Maryland General Assembly this month will establish the first-ever state funding for UMD’s state-wide “greening” program, Sustainable Maryland (SM). SB14, which passed the Maryland’s house and senate April 11, will provide $500,000 annually to UMD’s Environmental Finance Center (EFC), which administers Sustainable Maryland, to expand the no-cost program’s impact and reach across the state.

Two University of Maryland professors are among 28 distinguished scholars and writers today named 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellows, an honor that comes with a $200,000 award.

The online version of the classic board game Diplomacy, reportedly favored by John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger and Walter Cronkite, is serving as a fun testbed for University of Maryland computational linguists developing a new way to fight a serious and costly cybersecurity threat.

Associate Professor Ming Hu will join the nation’s top minds in science, technology and engineering as a 2022-2023 Jefferson Science Fellow for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. Hu is one of 14 scholars to be part of the program’s 19th class, which was established in 2003 by the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State. Fellows builds STEM expertise within the U.S. Department of State and the U.S.

The Center for Research in Extreme Batteries (CREB) has received a cooperative agreement (CA) totaling $9 million from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) - $8.55M will go to the University of Maryland (UMD) and $450K goes to Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories – to advance transformational army batteries.