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Researchers unexpectedly discovered toxic airborne pollutants in Oklahoma. The image above depicts a field in Oklahoma. Credit: Shutterstock University of Colorado Boulder researchers made the first-ever airborne detection of Medium Chain Chlorinated Paraffins (MCCPs) in the Western Hemisphere. Sometimes, scientific research feels a lot like solving a mystery. Scientists head into the field with a clear goal and a solid hypothesis, but then the data reveals something surprising. That’s when the real detective work begins. This is exactly what happened to a team from the University of Colorado Boulder during a recent field study in rural Oklahoma. They were using a state-of-the-art instrument to track how tiny particles form and grow in the air. But instead of just collecting expected data, they uncovered something completely new: the first-ever airborne detection of Medium Chain Chlorinated Paraffins (MCCPs), a kind of toxic organic pollutant, in the Western Hemisphere. The teams findings were published in ACS Environmental Au. “It’s very exciting as a scientist to find something unexpected like this that we weren’t looking for,” said Daniel Katz, CU Boulder chemistry PhD student and lead author of the study. “We’re starting to learn more about this toxic, organic pollutant that we know is out there, and which we need to understand better.” MCCPs are currently under consideration for regulation by the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty to protect human health from long-standing and widespread chemicals. While the toxic pollutants have been measured in Antarctica and Asia, researchers haven’t been sure how to document them in the Western Hemisphere’s atmosphere until now. From Wastewater to Farmlands MCCPs are used in fluids for metal working and in the construction of PVC and textiles. They are often found in wastewater and as a result, can end up in biosolid fertilizer, also called sewage sludge, which is created when liquid is removed from wastewater in a treatment plant. In Oklahoma, researchers suspect the MCCPs they identified came from biosolid fertilizer in the fields near where they set up their instrument. “When sewage sludges are spread across the fields, those toxic compounds could be released into the air,” Katz said. “We can’t show directly that that’s happening, but we think it’s a reasonable way that they could be winding up in the air. Sewage sludge fertilizers have been shown to release similar compounds.” MCCPs little cousins, Short Chain Chlorinated Paraffins (SCCPs), are currently regulated by the Stockholm Convention, and since 2009, by the EPA here in the United States. Regulation came after studies found the toxic pollutants, which travel far and last a long time in the atmosphere, were harmful to human health. But researchers hypothesize that the regulation of SCCPs may have increased MCCPs in the environment. “We always have these unintended consequences of regulation, where you regulate something, and then there’s still a need for the products that those were in,” said Ellie Browne, CU Boulder chemistry professor, CIRES Fellow, and co-author of the study. “So they get replaced by something.” Measurement of aerosols led to a new and surprising discovery Using a nitrate chemical ionization mass spectrometer, which allows scientists to identify chemical compounds in the air, the team measured air at the agricultural site 24 hours a day for one month. As Katz cataloged the data, he documented the different isotopic patterns in the compounds. The compounds measured by the team had distinct patterns, and he noticed new patterns that he immediately identified as different from the known chemical compounds. With some additional research, he identified them as chlorinated paraffins found in MCCPs. Katz says the makeup of MCCPs are similar to PFAS, long-lasting toxic chemicals that break down slowly over time. Known as “forever chemicals,” their presence in soils recently led the Oklahoma Senate to ban biosolid fertilizer. Now that researchers know how to measure MCCPs, the next step might be to measure the pollutants at different times throughout the year to understand how levels change each season. Many unknowns surrounding MCCPs remain, and there’s much more to learn about their environmental impacts. “We identified them, but we still don’t know exactly what they do when they are in the atmosphere, and they need to be investigated further,” Katz said. “I think it’s important that we continue to have governmental agencies that are capable of evaluating the science and regulating these chemicals as necessary for public health and safety.” Reference: “Real-Time Measurements of Gas-Phase Medium-Chain Chlorinated Paraffins Reveal Daily Changes in Gas-Particle Partitioning Controlled by Ambient Temperature” by Daniel John Katz, Bri Dobson, Mitchell Alton, Harald Stark, Douglas R. Worsnop, Manjula R. Canagaratna and Eleanor C. Browne, 5 June 2025, ACS Environmental Au. DOI: 10.1021/acsenvironau.5c00038 Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.

When Leta Sobierajski enrolled in college, she already knew what she was meant to do, and she didn’t settle for anything less. “When I went to school for graphic design, I really didn’t have a backup plan – it was this, or nothing,” she says. “My work is a constantly evolving practice, and from the beginning, I have always convinced myself that if I put in the time and experimentation, I would grow and evolve.” After graduation, Sobierajski took on a range of projects, which included animation, print, and branding elements. She collaborated with corporate clients, but realized that she wouldn’t feel comfortable following anyone else’s rules in a 9-to-5 environment. Leta Sobierajski (standing) and Wade Jeffree (on ladder) \\\ Photo: Matt Dutile Sobierajski eventually decided to team up with fellow artist and kindred spirit Wade Jeffree. In 2016 they launched their Brooklyn-based studio, Wade and Leta. The duo, who share a taste for quirky aesthetics, produces sculpture, installations, or anything else they can dream up. Never static in thinking or method, they are constantly searching for another medium to try that will complement their shared vision of the moment. The pair is currently interested in permanency, and they want to utilize more metal, a strong material that will stand the test of time. Small architectural pieces are also on tap, and on a grander scale, they’d like to focus on a park or communal area that everyone can enjoy. With so many ideas swirling around, Sobierajski will record a concept in at least three different ways so that she’s sure to unearth it at a later date. “In some ways, I like to think I’m impeccably organized, as I have countless spreadsheets tracking our work, our lives, and our well-being,” she explains. “The reality is that I am great at over-complicating situations with my intensified list-making and note-taking. The only thing to do is to trust the process.” Today, Leta Sobierajski joins us for Friday Five! Photo: Melitta Baumeister and Michał Plata 1. Melitta Baumeister and Michał Plata The work of Melitta Baumeister and Michał Plata has been a constant inspiration to me for their innovative, artful, and architectural silhouettes. By a practice of draping and arduous pattern-making, the garments that they develop season after season feel like they could be designed for existence in another universe. I’m a person who likes to dress up for anything when I’m not in the studio, and every time I opt to wear one of their looks, I feel like I can take on the world. The best part about their pieces is that they’re extremely functional, so whether I need to hop on a bicycle or show up at an opening, I’m still able to make a statement – these garments even have the ability to strike up conversations on their own. Photo: Wade and Leta 2. Pandas! I was recently in Chengdu to launch a new project and we took half the day to visit the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Pandas and I am a new panda convert. Yes, they’re docile and cute, but their lifestyles are utterly chill and deeply enviable for us adults with responsibilities. Giant pandas primarily eat bamboo and can consume 20-40 kilograms per day. When they’re not doing that, they’re sleeping. When we visited, many could be seen reclining on their backs, feasting on some of the finest bamboo they could select within arm’s reach. While not necessarily playful in appearance, they do seem quite cheeky in their agendas and will do as little as they can to make the most of their meals. It felt like I was watching a mirrored image of myself on a Sunday afternoon while trying to make the most of my last hours of the weekend. Photo: Courtesy of Aoiro 3. Aoiro I’m not really a candle person (I forget to light it, and then I forget it’s lit, and then I panic when it’s been lit for too long) but I love the luxurious subtlety of a fragrant space. It’s an intangible feeling that really can only be experienced in the present. Some of the best people to create these fragrances, in my opinion, are Shizuko and Manuel, the masterminds behind Aoiro, a Japanese and Austrian duo who have developed a keen sense for embodying the fragrances of some of the most intriguing and captivating olfactory atmospheres – earthy forest floors with crackling pine needles, blue cypress tickling the moon in an indigo sky, and rainfall on a spirited Japanese island. Despite living in an urban city, Aoiro’s olfactory design is capable of transporting me to the deepest forests of misty Yakushima island. Photo: Wade and Leta 4. Takuro Kuwata A few months ago, I saw the work of Japanese ceramicist Takuro Kuwata at an exhibition at Salon94 and have been having trouble getting it out of my head. Kuwata’s work exemplifies someone who has worked with a medium so much to completely use the medium as a medium – if that makes sense. His ability to manipulate clay and glaze and use it to create gravity-defying effects within the kiln are exceptionally mysterious to me and feel like they could only be accomplished with years and years of experimentation with the material. I’m equally impressed seeing how he’s grown his work with scale, juxtaposing it with familiar iconography like the fuzzy peach, but sculpting it from materials like bronze. Photo: Wade and Leta 5. The Site of Reversible Destiny, a park built by artists Arakawa and Gins, in Yoro Japan The park is a testament to their career as writers, architects, and their idea of reversible destiny, which in its most extreme form, eliminates death. For all that are willing to listen, Arakawa and Gins’ Reversible Destiny mentality aims to make our lives a little more youthful by encouraging us to reevaluate our relationship with architecture and our surroundings. The intention of “reversible destiny” is not to prolong death, postpone it, grow older alongside it, but to entirely not acknowledge and surpass it. Wade (my partner) and I have spent the last ten years traveling to as many of their remaining sites as possible to further understand this notion of creating spaces to extend our lives and question how conventional living spaces can become detrimental to our longevity.   Works by Wade and Leta: Photo: Wade and Leta and Matt Alexander Now You See Me is a large-scale installation in the heart of Shoreditch, London, that explores the relationship between positive and negative space through bold color, geometry, and light. Simple, familiar shapes are embedded within monolithic forms, creating a layered visual experience that shifts throughout the day. As sunlight passes through the structures, shadows and silhouettes stretch and connect, forming dynamic compositions on the surrounding concrete. Photo: Wade and Leta and John Wylie Paint Your Own Path is series of five towering sculptures, ranging from 10 to 15 feet tall, invites viewers to explore balance, tension, and perspective through bold color and form. Inspired by the delicate, often precarious act of stacking objects, the sculptures appear as if they might topple – yet each one holds steady, challenging perceptions of stability. Created in partnership with the Corolla Cross, the installation transforms its environment into a pop-colored landscape. Photo: Millenia Walk and Outer Edit, Eurthe Studio Monument to Movement is a 14-meter-tall kinetic sculpture that celebrates the spirit of the holiday season through rhythm, motion, and color. Rising skyward in layered compositions, the work symbolizes collective joy, renewal, and the shared energy of celebrations that span cultures and traditions. Powered by motors and constructed from metal beams and cardboard forms, the sculpture continuously shifts, inviting viewers to reflect on the passage of time and the cycles that connect us all. Photo: Wade and Leta and Erika Hara, Piotr Maslanka, and Jeremy Renault Falling Into Place is a vibrant rooftop installation at Ginza Six that explores themes of alignment, adaptability, and perspective. Six colorful structures – each with a void like a missing puzzle piece – serve as spaces for reflection, inviting visitors to consider their place within a greater whole. Rather than focusing on absence, the design transforms emptiness into opportunity, encouraging people to embrace spontaneity and the unfolding nature of life. Playful yet contemplative, the work emphasizes that only through connection and participation can the full picture come into view. Photo: Wade and Leta and Erika Hara, Piotr Maslanka, and Jeremy Renault Photo: Wade and Leta Stop, Listen, Look is a 7-meter-tall interactive artwork atop IFS Chengdu that captures the vibrant rhythm of the city through movement, sound, and form. Blending motorized and wind-powered elements with seesaws and sound modulation, it invites people of all ages to engage, play, and reflect. Inspired by Chengdu’s balance of tradition and modernity, the piece incorporates circular motifs from local symbolism alongside bold, geometric forms to create a dialogue between past and present. With light, motion, and community at its core, the work invites visitors to connect with the city – and each other – through shared interaction. The Cloud is a permanent sculptural kiosk in Burlington, Vermont’s historic City Hall Park, created in collaboration with Brooklyn-based Studio RENZ+OEI. Designed to reinterpret the ephemeral nature of clouds through architecture, it blends art, air, and imagination into a light, fluid structure that defies traditional rigidity. Originally born from a creative exchange between longtime friends and collaborators, the design challenges expectations of permanence by embodying movement and openness. Now home to a local food vendor, The Cloud brings a playful, uplifting presence to the park, inviting reflection and interaction rain or shine..

May 2023 was kind of a big deal. A little ol’ game called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (ring any bells?) was released, and everyone was playing it; Tears sold almost 20 million copies in under two months. However, it wasn’t the only game that came out that month. While it may not have generated as much buzz at the time, Planet of Lana is one of 2023’s best indies — and it’s getting a sequel next year.Planet of Lana is a cinematic puzzle-platformer. You play as Lana as she tries to rescue her best friend and fellow villagers after they were taken by mechanical alien beings. She’s accompanied by a little cat-like creature named Mui (because any game is made better by having a cat in it). Together, they outwit the alien robots in various puzzles on their way to rescuing the villagers.The puzzles aren’t too difficult, but they still provide a welcome challenge; some require precise execution lest the alien robots grab Lana too. Danger lurks everywhere as there are also native predators vying to get a bite out of Lana and her void of a cat companion. Mui is often at the center of solving environmental puzzles, which rely on a dash of stealth, to get around those dangerous creatures.Planet of Lana’s art style is immediately eye-catching; its palette of soft, inviting colors contrasts with the comparatively dark storyline. Lana and Mui travel through the grassy plains surrounding her village, an underground cave, and through a desert. The visuals are bested only by Planet of Lana’s music, which is both chill and powerful in parts.Of course, all ends well — this is a game starring a child and an alien cat, after all. Nothing bad was really going to happen to them. Or at least, that was certainly the case in the first game, but the trailer for Planet of Lana 2: Children of the Leaf ends with a shot of poor Mui lying in some sort of hospital bed or perhaps at a research station. Lana looks on, and her worry is palpable in the frame.But, Planet of Lana 2 won’t come out until 2026, so I don’t want to spend too much time worrying about the little dude. The cat’s fine (Right? Right?). What’s not fine, however, is Lana’s village and her people. In the trailer for the second game, we see more alien robots trying to zap her and her friend, and a young villager falls into a faint.Children of the Leaf is certainly upping the stakes and widening its scope. Ships from outer space zoom through a lush forest, and we get exciting shots of Lana hopping from ship to ship. Lana also travels across various environments, including a gorgeous underwater level, and rides on the back of one of the alien robots from the first game.I’m very excited to see how the lore of Planet of Lana expands with its sequel, and I can’t wait to tag along for another journey with Lana and Mui when Planet of Lana 2: Children of the Leaf launches in 2026. You can check out the first game on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC.See More:

There’s a Sphere-alike in Redrock, MindsEye’s open-world version of Las Vegas. It’s pretty much a straight copy of the original: a huge soap bubble, half sunk into the desert floor, with its surface turned into a gigantic TV. Occasionally you’ll pull up near the Sphere while driving an electric vehicle made by Silva, the megacorp that controls this world. You’ll sometimes come to a stop just as an advert for an identical Silva EV plays out on the huge curved screen overhead. The doubling effect can be slightly vertigo-inducing.At these moments, I truly get what MindsEye is trying to do. You’re stuck in the ultimate company town, where oligarchs and other crooks run everything, and there’s no hope of escaping the ecosystem they’ve built. MindsEye gets this all across through a chance encounter, and in a way that’s both light of touch and clever. The rest of the game tends towards the heavy-handed and silly, but it’s nice to glimpse a few instances where everything clicks.With its Spheres and omnipresent EVs, MindsEye looks and sounds like the future. It’s concerned with AI and tech bros and the insidious creep of a corporate dystopia. You play as an amnesiac former-soldier who must work out the precise damage that technology has done to his humanity, while shooting people and robots and drones. And alongside the campaign itself, MindsEye also has a suite of tools for making your own game or levels and publishing them for fellow players. All of this has come from a studio founded by Leslie Benzies, whose production credits include the likes of GTA 5.AI overlords … MindsEye. Photograph: IOI PartnersWhat’s weird, then, is that MindsEye generally plays like the past. Put a finger to the air and the wind is blowing from somewhere around 2012. At heart, this is a roughly hewn cover shooter with an open world that you only really experience when you’re driving between missions. Its topical concerns mainly exist to justify double-crosses and car chases and shootouts, and to explain why you head into battle with a personal drone that can open doors for you and stun nearby enemies.It can be an uncanny experience, drifting back through the years to a time when many third-person games still featured unskippable cut-scenes and cover that could be awkward to unstick yourself from. I should add that there are plenty of reports at the moment of crashes and technical glitches and characters turning up without their faces in place. Playing on a relatively old PC, aside from one crash and a few amusing bugs, I’ve been mostly fine. I’ve just been playing a game that feels equally elderly.This is sometimes less of a criticism than it sounds. There is a definite pleasure to be had in simple run-and-gun missions where you shoot very similar looking people over and over again and pick a path between waypoints. The shooting often feels good, and while it’s a bit of a swizz to have to drive to and from each mission, the cars have a nice fishtaily looseness to them that can, at times, invoke the Valium-tinged glory of the Driver games. (The airborne craft are less fun because they have less character.)Driving between missions … MindsEye. Photograph: Build A Rocket Boy/IOI PartnersAnd for a game that has thought a lot about the point at which AI takes over, the in-game AI around me wasn’t in danger of taking over anything. When I handed over control of my car to the game while tailing an enemy, having been told I should try not to be spotted, the game made sure our bumpers kissed at every intersection. The streets of this particular open world are filled with amusingly unskilled AI drivers. I’d frequently arrive at traffic lights to be greeted by a recent pile-up, so delighted by the off-screen collisions that had scattered road cones and Dumpsters across my path that I almost always stopped to investigate.I even enjoyed the plot’s hokeyness, which features lines such as: “Your DNA has been altered since we last met!” Has it, though? Even so, I became increasingly aware that clever people had spent a good chunk of their working lives making this game. I don’t think they intended to cast me as what is in essence a Deliveroo bullet courier for an off-brand Elon Musk. Or to drop me into an open world that feels thin not because it lacks mission icons and fishing mini-games, but because it’s devoid of convincing human detail.I suspect the problem may actually be a thematically resonant one: a reckless kind of ambition. When I dropped into the level editor I found a tool that’s astonishingly rich and complex, but which also requires a lot of time and effort if you want to make anything really special in it. This is for the mega-fans, surely, the point-one percent. It must have taken serious time to build, and to do all that alongside a campaign (one that tries, at least, to vary things now and then with stealth, trailing and sniper sections) is the kind of endeavour that requires a real megacorp behind it.MindsEye is an oddity. For all its failings, I rarely disliked playing it, and yet it’s also difficult to sincerely recommend. Its ideas, its moment-to-moment action and narrative are so thinly conceived that it barely exists. And yet: I’m kind of happy that it does. MindsEye is out now; £54.99

Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid. But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government $180 billion — well short of its ambitious (and frankly never realistic) target of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk’s departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go. For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE’s tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. “DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,” she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government program. “I was Elon Musk,” she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk’s record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire’s loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. What do you think Elon Musk’s legacy is? Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there’s a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it’s doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce. There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren’t?First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. So the first thing that happened is, courts said, “No, no, no, you can’t do it this way. You have to bring them back.” The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren’t on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary’s home, what’s happening is they’re looking at these cuts and they’re saying, “No, no, no! We can’t live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.”As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they’re going to have a tough time, and they’re going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they’ve said a lot of insulting things. Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They’re not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They’re scientists. They’re engineers. They’re people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there’s going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it’s analogous to the lasting damage that they’re causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.What happens to this agency now? Who’s in charge of it?Well, what they’ve done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who’s the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he’s gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump’s appointed leaders.And just to bring this around to what we’re here talking about now, they’re in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately?It’s actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It’s adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it’s worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense.Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That’s why it’s so hard to cut it. It’s so hard to cut it because it’s us. And people are living on it. Now, there’s a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it’s called entitlement reform, right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that’s because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues. See More:

Greg Touhill, director of the Software Engineering’s Institute’s (SEI’s) Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) division is an atypical technology leader. For one thing, he’s been in tech and other leadership positions that span the US Air Force, the US government, the private sector and now SEI’s CERT. More importantly, he’s been a major force in the cybersecurity realm, making the world a safer place and even saving lives. Touhill earned a bachelor’s degree from the Pennsylvania State University, a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, a master’s degree from the Air War College, was a senior executive fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and completed executive education studies at the University of North Carolina. “I was a student intern at Carnegie Mellon, but I was going to college at Penn State and studying chemical engineering. As an Air Force ROTC scholarship recipient, I knew I was going to become an Air Force officer but soon realized that I didn’t necessarily want to be a chemical engineer in the Air Force,” says Touhill. “Because I passed all the mathematics, physics, and engineering courses, I ended up becoming a communications, electronics, and computer systems officer in the Air Force. I spent 30 years, one month and three days on active duty in the United States Air Force, eventually retiring as a brigadier general and having done many different types of jobs that were available to me within and even beyond my career field.” Related:Specifically, he was an operational commander at the squadron, group, and wing levels. For example, as a colonel, Touhill served as director of command, control, communications and computers (C4) for the United States Central Command Forces, then he was appointed chief information officer and director, communications and information at Air Mobility Command. Later, he served as commander, 81st Training Wing at Kessler Air Force Base where he was promoted to brigadier general and commanded over 12,500 personnel. After that, he served as the senior defense officer and US defense attaché at the US Embassy in Kuwait, before concluding his military career as the chief information officer and director, C4 systems at the US Transportation Command, one of 10 US combatant commands, where he and his team were awarded the NSA Rowlett Award for the best cybersecurity program in the government. While in the Air Force, Touhill received numerous awards and decorations including the Bronze Star medal and the Air Force Science and Engineering Award. He is the only three-time recipient of the USAF C4 Professionalism Award. Related:Greg Touhill“I got to serve at major combatant commands, work with coalition partners from many different countries and represented the US as part of a diplomatic mission to Kuwait for two years as the senior defense official at a time when America was withdrawing forces out of Iraq. I also led the negotiation of a new bilateral defense agreement with the Kuwaitis,” says Touhill. “Then I was recruited to continue my service and was asked to serve as the deputy assistant secretary of cybersecurity and communications at the Department of Homeland Security, where I ran the operations of what is now known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. I was there at a pivotal moment because we were building up the capacity of that organization and setting the stage for it to become its own agency.” While at DHS, there were many noteworthy breaches including the infamous US Office of People Management (OPM) breach. Those events led to Obama’s visit to the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.  “I got to brief the president on the state of cybersecurity, what we had seen with the OPM breach and some other deficiencies,” says Touhill. “I was on the federal CIO council as the cybersecurity advisor to that since I’d been a federal CIO before and I got to conclude my federal career by being the first United States government chief information security officer. From there, I pivoted to industry, but I also got to return to Carnegie Mellon as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College, where I've been teaching since January 2017.” Related:Touhill has been involved in three startups, two of which were successfully acquired. He also served on three Fortune 100 advisory boards and on the Information Systems Audit and Control Association board, eventually becoming its chair for a term during the seven years he served there. Touhill just celebrated his fourth year at CERT, which he considers the pinnacle of the cybersecurity profession and everything he’s done to date. “Over my career I've led teams that have done major software builds in the national security space. I've also been the guy who's pulled cables and set up routers, hubs and switches, and I've been a system administrator. I've done everything that I could do from the keyboard up all the way up to the White House,” says Touhill. “For 40 years, the Software Engineering Institute has been leading the world in secure by design, cybersecurity, software engineering, artificial intelligence and engineering, pioneering best practices, and figuring out how to make the world a safer more secure and trustworthy place. I’ve had a hand in the making of today’s modern military and government information technology environment, beginning as a 22-year-old lieutenant, and hope to inspire the next generation to do even better.” What ‘Success’ Means Many people would be satisfied with their careers as a brigadier general, a tech leader, the White House’s first anything, or working at CERT, let alone running it. Touhill has spent his entire career making the world a safer place, so it’s not surprising that he considers his greatest achievement saving lives. “In the Middle East and Iraq, convoys were being attacked with improvised explosive devices. There were also ‘direct fire’ attacks where people are firing weapons at you and indirect fire attacks where you could be in the line of fire,” says Touhill. “The convoys were using SINCGARS line-of-site walkie-talkies for communications that are most effective when the ground is flat, and Iraq is not flat. As a result, our troops were at risk of not having reliable communications while under attack. As my team brainstormed options to remedy the situation, one of my guys found some technology, about the size of an iPhone, that could covert a radio signal, which is basically a waveform, into a digital pulse I could put on a dedicated network to support the convoy missions.” For $11 million, Touhill and his team quickly architected, tested, and fielded the Radio over IP network (aka “Ripper Net”) that had a 99% reliability rate anywhere in Iraq. Better still, convoys could communicate over the network using any radios. That solution saved a minimum of six lives. In one case, the hospital doctor said if the patient had arrived five minutes later, he would have died. Sage Advice Anyone who has ever spent time in the military or in a military family knows that soldiers are very well disciplined, or they wash out. Other traits include being physically fit, mentally fit, and achieving balance in life, though that’s difficult to achieve in combat. Still, it’s a necessity. “I served three and a half years down range in combat operations. My experience taught me you could be doing 20-hour days for a year or two on end. If you haven’t built a good foundation of being disciplined and fit, it impacts your ability to maintain presence in times of stress, and CISOs work in stressful situations,” says Touhill. “Staying fit also fortifies you for the long haul, so you don’t get burned out as fast.” Another necessary skill is the ability to work well with others.  “Cybersecurity is an interdisciplinary practice. One of the great joys I have as CERT director is the wide range of experts in many different fields that include software engineers, computer engineers, computer scientists, data scientists, mathematicians and physicists,” says Touhill. “I have folks who have business degrees and others who have philosophy degrees. It's really a rich community of interests all coming together towards that common goal of making the world a safer, more secure and more trusted place in the cyber domain. We’re are kind of like the cyber neighborhood watch for the whole world.” He also says that money isn’t everything, having taken a pay cut to go from being an Air Force brigadier general to the deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security . “You’ll always do well if you pick the job that matters most. That’s what I did, and I’ve been rewarded every step,” says Touhill.  The biggest challenge he sees is the complexity of cyber systems and software, which can have second, third, and fourth order effects.  “Complexity raises the cost of the attack surface, increases the attack surface, raises the number of vulnerabilities and exploits human weaknesses,” says Touhill. “The No. 1 thing we need to be paying attention to is privacy when it comes to AI because AI can unearth and discover knowledge from data we already have. While it gives us greater insights at greater velocities, we need to be careful that we take precautions to better protect our privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.” 

Meet Martha Swope, the Legendary Broadway Photographer Who Captured Iconic Moments From Hundreds of Productions and Rehearsals She spent nearly 40 years taking theater and dance pictures, providing glimpses behind the scenes and creating images that the public couldn’t otherwise access Stephanie Rudig - Freelance Writer June 11, 2025 Photographer Martha Swope sitting on a floor covered with prints of her photos in 1987 Andrea Legge / © NYPL Martha Swope wanted to be a dancer. She moved from her home state of Texas to New York to attend the School of American Ballet, hoping to start a career in dance. Swope also happened to be an amateur photographer. So, in 1957, a fellow classmate invited her to bring her camera and document rehearsals for a little theater show he was working on. The classmate was director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, and the show was West Side Story. One of those rehearsal shots ended up in Life magazine, and Swope quickly started getting professional bookings. It’s notoriously tough to make it on Broadway, but through photography, Swope carved out a career capturing theater and dance. Over the course of nearly four decades, she photographed hundreds more rehearsals, productions and promotional studio shots. Unidentified male chorus members dancing during rehearsals for musical West Side Story in 1957 Martha Swope / © NYPL At a time when live performances were not often or easily captured, Swope’s photographs caught the animated moments and distilled the essence of a show into a single image: André De Shields clad in a jumpsuit as the title character in The Wiz, Patti LuPone with her arms raised overhead in Evita, the cast of Cats leaping in feline formations, a close-up of a forlorn Sheryl Lee Ralph in Dreamgirls and the row of dancers obscuring their faces with their headshots in A Chorus Line were all captured by Swope’s camera. She was also the house photographer for the New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company and photographed other major dance companies such as the Ailey School. Her vision of the stage became fairly ubiquitous, with Playbill reporting that in the late 1970s, two-thirds of Broadway productions were photographed by Swope, meaning her work dominated theater and dance coverage. Carol Rosegg was early in her photography career when she heard that Swope was looking for an assistant. “I didn't frankly even know who she was,” Rosegg says. “Then the press agent who told me said, ‘Pick up any New York Times and you’ll find out.’” Swope’s background as a dancer likely equipped her to press the shutter at the exact right moment to capture movement, and to know when everyone on stage was precisely posed. She taught herself photography and early on used a Brownie camera, a simple box model made by Kodak. “She was what she described as ‘a dancer with a Brownie,’” says Barbara Stratyner, a historian of the performing arts who curated exhibitions of Swope’s work at the New York Public Library. An ensemble of dancers in rehearsal for the stage production Cats in 1982 Martha Swope / © NYPL “Dance was her first love,” Rosegg says. “She knew everything about dance. She would never use a photo of a dancer whose foot was wrong; the feet had to be perfect.” According to Rosegg, once the photo subjects knew she was shooting, “the anxiety level came down a little bit.” They knew that they’d look good in the resulting photos, and they likely trusted her intuition as a fellow dancer. Swope moved with the bearing of a dancer and often stood with her feet in ballet’s fourth position while she shot. She continued to take dance classes throughout her life, including at the prestigious Martha Graham School. Stratyner says, “As Graham got older, [Swope] was, I think, the only person who was allowed to photograph rehearsals, because Graham didn’t want rehearsals shown.” Photographic technology and the theater and dance landscapes evolved greatly over the course of Swope’s career. Rosegg points out that at the start of her own career, cameras didn’t even automatically advance the film after each shot. She explains the delicate nature of working with film, saying, “When you were shooting film, you actually had to compose, because you had 35 shots and then you had to change your film.” Swope also worked during a period of changing over from all black-and-white photos to a mixture of black-and-white and color photography. Rosegg notes that simultaneously, Swope would shoot black-and-white, and she herself would shoot color. Looking at Swope’s portfolio is also an examination of increasingly crisp photo production. Advances in photography made shooting in the dark or capturing subjects under blinding stage lights easier, and they allowed for better zooming in from afar. Martha Graham rehearses dancer Takako Asakawa and others in Heretic, a dance work choreographed by Graham, in 1986 Martha Swope / © NYPL It’s much more common nowadays to get a look behind the curtain of theater productions via social media. “The theater photographers of today need to supply so much content,” Rosegg says. “We didn’t have any of that, and getting to go backstage was kind of a big deal.” Photographers coming to document a rehearsal once might have been seen as an intrusion, but now, as Rosegg puts it, “everybody is desperate for you to come, and if you’re not there, they’re shooting it on their iPhone.” Even with exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the hottest tickets in town and the biggest stars of the day, Swope remained unpretentious. She lived and worked in a brownstone with her apartment above her studio, where the film was developed in a closet and the bathroom served as a darkroom. Rosegg recalls that a phone sat in the darkroom so they could be reached while printing, and she would be amazed at the big-name producers and theater glitterati who rang in while she was making prints in an unventilated space. From left to right: Paul Winfield, Ruby Dee, Marsha Jackson and Denzel Washington in the stage production Checkmates in 1988 Martha Swope / © NYPL Swope’s approachability extended to how she chose to preserve her work. She originally sold her body of work to Time Life, and, according to Stratyner, she was unhappy with the way the photos became relatively inaccessible. She took back the rights to her collection and donated it to the New York Public Library, where many photos can be accessed by researchers in person, and the entire array of photos is available online to the public in the Digital Collections. Searching “Martha Swope” yields over 50,000 items from more than 800 productions, featuring a huge variety of figures, from a white-suited John Travolta busting a disco move in Saturday Night Fever to Andrew Lloyd Webber with Nancy Reagan at a performance of Phantom of the Opera. Swope’s extensive career was recognized in 2004 with a special Tony Award, a Tony Honors for Excellence in Theater, which are given intermittently to notable figures in theater who operate outside of traditional awards categories. She also received a lifetime achievement award from the League of Professional Theater Women in 2007. Though she retired in 1994 and died in 2017, her work still reverberates through dance and Broadway history today. For decades, she captured the fleeting moments of theater that would otherwise never be seen by the public. And her passion was clear and straightforward. As she once told an interviewer: “I’m not interested in what’s going on on my side of the camera. I’m interested in what’s happening on the other side.” Get the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.