Officials from the U.S. Department of Defense and the University of Maryland gathered today for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to commemorate the opening of facilities that house the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS). Located in UMD’s Discovery District, ARLIS is one of 14 designated Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Centers in the nation, and the only one dedicated to solving intelligence and security problems.

A ship is lost at sea. Passengers huddle in lifeboats, awaiting rescue. Thankfully, help is on the way. Emergency beacons housed aboard the lifeboats have transmitted location data to orbiting satellites, which relayed the information to ground stations. Equipped with this data, search and rescue professionals at Mission Control Centers alerted first responders to the location of the stranded passengers.

A new study by University of Maryland astronomers shows that comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB), the largest comet ever discovered, was active long before previously thought, meaning the ice within it is vaporizing and forming an envelope of dust and vapor known as a coma. Only one active comet has been observed farther from the sun, and it was much smaller than comet BB.

A new University of Maryland study conducted in a neighboring Prince George’s County community suggests that creating safer Black and Latinx neighborhoods doesn’t require more policing, but more investment. The research examined outcomes of a four-year crime reduction project in Langley Park, demonstrating that more streetlights, mental health services, youth outreach and public art are as important—and possibly more effective—at boosting community safety in immigrant neighborhoods than programs designed to build trust with local police.

It’s hard to overstate the environmental importance of trees, which among other functions pull climate change-inducing carbon from the atmosphere, clean the air of toxins and help control runoff. While it can likewise be hard to quantify some of these effects, a new study by University of Maryland researchers helps clarify the role of urban trees in mitigating stormwater flows, and finds that even isolated trees lining a street or planted in a park may have a significant effect.

Twenty-seven University of Maryland researchers have been recognized in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2021 list.

A $3 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will support a new effort at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD); the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); and Morgan State University to expand the pipeline of women faculty and Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaskan Native faculty in the arts and humanities to the ranks of academic leadership.

In November 2021, NASA extended a cooperative agreement with the University of Maryland, providing $32.5 million for UMD to continue managing and administering the Small Bodies Node (SBN) of NASA’s Planetary Data System. The Planetary Data System program ensures that data collected on NASA missions is cataloged, archived and made publicly accessible for future studies. The SBN is the branch of that system that houses data on asteroids, comets, meteorites and other small objects in space.

If you’ve recently felt more pain at the pump or groceries have taken a bigger bite out of your wallet, it’s not just about your choice of gas station or brand-name cereal. An old economic foe has reared its head.

A University of Maryland expert in computational imaging has received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) to develop novel algorithms for fusing multimodal sensing data.