Washington, DC - The United States welcomes today’s historic opening of the Embassy of the United States of America in Havana, Cuba, and the opening of the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Washington, DC - Tech-savvy teens from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian Territories, and Tunisia will participate in the fourth annual TechGirls exchange program from July 21-August 12. While in the United States, they will develop the knowledge, resources, peer networks, and mentor relationships necessary to pursue higher education and careers in technology.

Vatican City - One month after the release of Pope Francis' encyclical, Laudato Si', and just months before the world's leaders convene in Paris for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. will join the pope, representatives of the United Nations and mayors and local governors from across the globe at the Vatican this week to discuss two of the world's greatest challenges: climate change and modern slavery.

Cambridge, Massachusetts - Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” produces a lot of wastewater. Drilling one well requires millions of gallons of water that’s injected into the ground to loosen rocks and release oil. While some is reused, much of the produced water is discarded into deep injection wells, and clean water is purchased again and again.

Cambridge, Massachusetts - When a power company wants to build a new wind farm, it generally hires a consultant to make wind speed measurements at the proposed site for eight to 12 months. Those measurements are correlated with historical data and used to assess the site’s power-generation capacity.

Cambridge, Massachusetts - Materials known as conjugated polymers have been seen as very promising candidates for electronics applications, including capacitors, photodiodes, sensors, organic light-emitting diodes, and thermoelectric devices. But they’ve faced one major obstacle: Nobody has been able to explain just how electrical conduction worked in these materials, or to predict how they would behave when used in such devices.