The Department of Energy teamed up with researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory to create a cybersecurity technology to secure an electric power grid through the visualization of intelligence data. The Structured Threat Intelligence Graph is intended to allow utility operators and owners to share, build and edit cyberattack information, INL said Wednesday. 

“This software helps analysts process new threat information rapidly and makes it easier for them to find or create relationships between pieces of information,” said Jed Haile, cybersecurity researcher and tool developer at INL. 

The team has also collaborated with Southern California Edison to test the application on Southern California’s 50,000-square mile electricity grid. INL released the platform’s open-source code on GitHub to encourage other developers to update the technology and help secure U.S. critical infrastructure systems.

NASA plans to address the digging limitation of the InSight Mars robot’s heat probe that results from structures blocking the lander’s cameras. The heat probe is a hammering spike originally geared to dig up to 16 feet under Martian ground. However, misplaced support structures have limited the probe to no more than 12 inches of digging, the space agency said Wednesday.

A team of scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have analyzed the problem for months and are hypothesizing the cause to be a lack in soil friction around the InSight lander. JPL is working to address the problem with the German Aerospace Center, provider of the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package that the probe is part of.

NASA personnel plan to use the lander’s robotic arm to move the structures out of the camera’s field of view. The space agency may push through with the plan in late June. Tilman Spohn, HP3 principal investigator at the German Aerospace Center, said using the robotic arm would address the lack of soil friction, based on calculations.

Information technology professionals are calling on the government to invest in blockchain and take steps to better understand the technology, Federal Times reported Thursday.

Alan McQuinn, senior policy analyst for the IT and Innovation Foundation, said that the U.S. needs to be more competitive and promote the use of blockchain, which can help simplify auditing and supply chain operations for large agencies like the departments of Defense and State during the ACT-IAC Emerging Technology Forum in Washington, D.C.

“You have a network where people often have to submit paper files that can be faked and then it’s up to the government agency to decipher whether something is real or not,” said McQuinn. 

According to Cointelegraph, China has launched efforts to establish a city centered around blockchain technology.

Anil Cheriyan, director of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service, said GSA considers forming new core areas related to robotic process automation and identity management as part of the Centers of Excellence program to better facilitate operations, FCW reported Wednesday.

“We’re building new capabilities with robotics process automation. RPA with [artificial intelligence] looped into it is something that in my experience has worked in the private sector, particularly in the financial sector,” he said at an event Wednesday.

Cheriyan said the agency also plans to combine contact center and customer experience areas to form an “omnichannel experience” area as well as merge data center modernization with cloud adoption area. “You can’t do one without the other,” he added.

Jose Arrieta, chief information officer of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced plans to increase the agency’s partnerships within the government to boost innovation, Nextgov reported Wednesday.

Arrieta took office as HHS’ permanent CIO on May 28 after serving as the agency’s associate deputy assistant secretary for acquisition. He said that his initial priorities will focus on changing the functions of the CIO and utilizing emerging technologies.

His office is working to launch pilot programs to bring new tools to HHS. Arietta said he is in talks with the Defense Information Systems Agency to develop a wearable or mobile device as a new way of authentication. The Army and Air Force are also working with the CIO to integrate an HHS infrastructure accelerator into their operations. Another area on Arietta’s priority list is the internet of things.

“It’s all about building relationships at a level where you can actually partner with federal organizations that want to make change,” he said. “I think the innovation will occur in private industry, but government taking the first step is a big thing.”

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Atala and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine are teaming to create a tool to build interconnected organoids within the body, DVIDS reported Tuesday. The Integrated Organoid Testing System utilizes 3D printed bio-structures, microfluidic devices and human organ cells to try to develop organs with regenerative capacities.

DTRA intends to use the technology to manufacture miniaturized organoid systems that may forecast a drug candidate’s tolerance prior to clinical trials. The agency has also started to build organoid systems from animal models at WFIRM to assist researchers in the development of countermeasures against biological and chemical warfare.