The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a four-year program that seeks to discover and optimize biologically sourced or inspired molecules that limit ice crystal growth, formation and adhesion to help develop technologies that could address operational challenges facing the Department of Defense in extreme cold environments.

Researchers under the three-phase Ice Control for cold Environments program will work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory to test and assess candidate molecules, DARPA said Tuesday.

“Insects, fish, plants and freeze-tolerant organisms have evolved natural mechanisms to prevent ice formation and thrive in extreme cold,” said Anne Cheever, ICE program manager.

“These properties could be leveraged as part of the ICE program to develop persistent anti-icing coatings for surfaces and even produce specialized small molecules that work synergistically with biodegradable antifreeze proteins,” Cheever added.

DARPA will hold a Proposers’ Day on Aug. 22th and accept proposal abstracts through Sept. 22th, according to a presolicitation notice.

Full proposals for the ICE program are due Nov. 8th.

KPMG has been chosen by the State of North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to lead the integration of various health care digital applications.

During the collaboration, the NC department will utilize KPMG’s Resource Integration Suite Connected Platform, which is founded in Red Hat’s OpenShift program, to unite disparate healthcare functions, evolve the current Medicaid software and give the state’s citizens a more accessible interface, KPMG said Thursday.

Mark Calem, advisory managing director of health and government solutions at KPMG, explained that the KRIS Connected Platform appeals to health and government organizations of all sizes for its customizable and modular features as well as its shared services capabilities.

“Most importantly, it supports the future of hybrid cloud integration, and we are glad to work with Red Hat to bring these transformational opportunities to our clients,” Calem added.

The new partnership will find KPMG and Red Hat working alongside NCDHHS to retool and modernize its legacy healthcare programs into a centralized, cloud-based service. They will align their modifications with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regulations and NCDHHS hopes that the KRIS Connected Platform will strengthen application and data interoperability.

Additionally, the finished, fully integrated product is intended to allow patients and healthcare providers to access their records and personal information with both security and speed. RedHat OpenShift’s cloud-native, containerized workloads are expected to help the NCDHHS and state to cut down expenses and reduce their technology footprint.

Chris Gray, vice president of the North America Partner Ecosystem at Red Hat, elucidated how the combined forces of KPMG’s KRIS platform and Red Hat OpenShift will merge cloud, legacy and on-site systems to “streamline operations and provide better user experiences for care providers and patients.” Gray said the collaboration with KPMG will be a fruitful one and likely proliferate throughout the public sector and extend into other industries.

Participants in the Defense Innovation Unit’s Harmonious Rook program will demonstrate their commercial geospatial intelligence and navigation warfare capabilities at upcoming domestic and international military exercises.

Harmonious Rock is a prototype project aimed at providing situational awareness of intentional disruptions of Global Navigation Satellite System that jeopardize position, navigation and timing capabilities of users worldwide.

The National Air and Space Intelligence Center and the National Space Intelligence Center and other defense and civilian agencies are participating in the program. The initiative also uses data, machine learning analytics, visualization and contextualization capabilities from several vendors and non-governmental organizations.

“Instead of developing, building, and deploying hardware tailored for collection of navigation warfare operations, we are accessing currently available commercial data and analytics to address the need for PNT situational awareness,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, program manager of Harmonious Rook.

The prototyping companies will support the Southeast Asia Cooperation and Training exercise that will take place later in August and the U.S. Army 1st Armored Division’s Command Post Exercise at the National Training Center in September.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has directed the Internal Revenue Service to come up with an operational plan to disburse the funds authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act to help initiate reform initiatives at the IRS, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The Inflation Reduction Act that was signed by President Biden into law Tuesday will provide the IRS with $80 billion in funds through fiscal year 2031 to support overhaul efforts.

Yellen issued a memo to IRS Commissioner Charles Retting citing her top priorities for the agency, such as enhancing taxpayer services, addressing the unprocessed tax return backlog, hiring new staff and replacing obsolete technology systems.

According to the memo, the IRS should develop the plans within six months. Wally Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the Treasury, will collaborate with Rettig to work on the initiatives and establish the timelines.

The law “provides the I.R.S. what it has needed for years — a stable stream of mandatory funding that will allow the agency to serve American taxpayers the way they deserve and to enforce the tax laws against high-net-worth individuals, large corporations and complex partnerships who today pay far less than they owe,” Yellen wrote in the memo.