Guests at the Planet Word Museum in Washington, D.C., have fun learning about language. A $440,000 NSF grant is funding a partnership between UMD, Howard University, Gallaudet University and the museum to expand public understanding about the science of language. Photo by DuHon Photography, courtesy of Planet Word

The energy contained within lithium-ion batteries has the potential to reshape the technology of the future battlefield, creating a worldwide demand for key lithium-ion battery materials such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, posing a supply problem for future production.

UMD Senior Lecturer Tom Mauriello and a team of 40-plus former FBI officials, law enforcement officers, prosecutors and forensic scientists believe they may have finally identified the individual responsible for multiple northern California murders in the 1960s: The Zodiac Killer.

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice Professors Peter Reuter and Greg Midgette, along with Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie-Mellon University, advise that both researchers and the general public take the forthcoming findings of the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)—a nationwide, general population survey (GPS) of 70,000 Americans released each fall—with a grain of salt.

A disaster strikes, and evacuation orders are issued. But what happens if those orders don’t reach people at risk? In recent years, as fires raged in parts of California, domestic workers and groundskeepers continued to show up in affected neighborhoods, even though the residents had already cleared out. The reason? Nobody had thought to contact the many lower-income workers who came into those communities each day to earn a living.

Nature versus nurture. It’s the core of a classic struggle to describe why people behave the way they do. Is it lived experience or is it biology? In most cases, it’s probably both, but the science of teasing out the details is complicated.

Astronomers have discovered the first confirmed planetary system that offers a glimpse into the fate of our solar system about five billion years into the future. That’s when our sun is expected to exhaust all its nuclear fuel and fade into a white dwarf, or dead star.