As I peer into the cardboard box NIST researcher Amanda Forster holds out for me, I can’t help thinking that this mild-mannered materials scientist has an impressive collection of shivs. The handmade prison weapons include a ballpoint pen with a razor embedded in the shaft and a toothbrush — originally designed to be gentle on your gums — that’s been re-engineered to easily puncture flesh. They are vivid evidence of a scary fact of prison life: anything can be turned into a weapon.

Amid deadly shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, a major purchase of heavy ballistic protective equipment by the country's largest police department illustrates the sense of danger among cops that experts say is at its highest in decades.

The New York City Police Department -- which employees more officers than any other police force in the country -- announced on Monday that it would spend $7.5 million to buy 6,000 heavy ballistic vests and 20,000 ballistic helmets for its officers.

Experts from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Joint Science and Technology Office and the Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center are getting creative with a new decontamination System Performance Model (SPM).

As the EMS adage goes, "If you’ve seen one EMS system, you’ve seen one EMS system." While that statement reflects the diversity of EMS systems across the United States, it also creates the false sense that every EMS system is entirely different and that EMS leaders can’t learn from each other.

Clearly that is not the case. As we see in the premiere edition of the EMS Trend Report, EMS systems across the country share many traits. On the other hand, significant differences do exist in everything from clinical care to salaries to operational benchmarks to hiring requirements.

Firefighters often find themselves in situations where they are in danger of receiving burns because of a rapid rise in the ambient temperature to a level beyond the protective capabilities of the Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) and the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) worn by the firefighters. The hazard associated with infrared radiation (IR) is particularly acute because the intensity of IR can increase to dangerous levels in seconds.