The Supreme Court has approved the Justice Department‘s proposed amendment that will help investigators streamline search warrant applications and dismantle botnet operations.

Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general at DOJ’s criminal division, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday the amendment to the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure on search warrants will take effect on Dec. 1, 2016.

The amendment will permit botnet investigators to bring a search warrant application to one federal court rather than apply for identical warrants in up to 94 judicial districts if they want to investigate infected computers across the U.S., Caldwell said.

“The rule would make no changes to the substantive law governing probable cause or particularity, or to when it may or may not be appropriate to search an infected computer,” Caldwell noted.

“The only thing the rule would do is identify a single court that is authorized to consider those questions in the context of an application for a search warrant,” she added.

Caldwell said DOJ should engage in more operations to mitigate mass hacking such as the collective effort of the FBI, various countries and computer security companies in 2014 to dismantle the Gameover Zeus botnet that allegedly stole more than $100 million from American victims.

Botnets are networks of computers infected with malware and are remotely controlled by criminals to invade victims’ privacy and access personal or financial information.

Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has said DARPA has launched programs that seek to make the space environment a “real-time operational domain” in support of military missions, intelligence and other national security efforts, DoD News reported Tuesday.

Cheryl Pellerin writes Prabhakar said at the 4th annual Defense One Summit that DARPA has introduced the second phase of its Experimental Spaceplane program that seeks to expedite the launch of satellite systems and other assets into space.

The XS-1 program “is a reusable first stage that’s designed to be able to put 3,000 or 5,000 pounds into low earth orbit … at a very low cost point — a few million dollars — but very significantly the objective on the DARPA program is by the end of the program to fly that spacecraft 10 times in 10 days,” Prabhakar said during a conversation with Christopher Mims, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, at the event.

She also discussed DARPA’s work on robotics systems designed to facilitate repairs and inspections of space assets at geostationary Earth orbit through the Phoenix program, according to the report.

Researchers at the Energy Department‘s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have released a new study that quantifies the thermodynamic scale of metastability on approximately 30,000 known materials.

LLNL said Friday the scale helps transform the design and creation of next-generation materials to be used for applications such as semiconductors and pharmaceuticals.

“Materials design and development is truly a slow process but is now being greatly accelerated by the fact that we can compute properties of compounds before they are made,” added Gerbrand Ceder, corresponding author of the research paper.

“What we’ve done is large-scale data mining on nearly 30,000 observed materials to explicitly measure the thermodynamic scale of metastability, as a function of a wide variety of parameters, like chemistry and composition, which inorganic chemists and materials scientists can use to build intuition,” said Wenhao Sun, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The White House will host on Nov. 29 a discussion on how data collection and integration efforts could help facilitate the deployment of electric vehicles and charging stations.

The White House’s office of science and technology policy and domestic policy council will collaborate with the Energy Department and four of DOE’s national laboratories to conduct the Electric Vehicle Datathon, according to a blog post published Friday.

The invitation-only event will convene EV experts, software developers and data science professionals to discuss best practices on data collection, data sets that could be derived from the Transportation Department’s Alternative Fuel Corridors and other programs, and information that could help local planners prepare their communities for EV deployment.

Austin Brown, assistant director for clean energy and transportation at OSTP, co-wrote the post with Candace Vahlsing, senior policy adviser for energy and climate change.