The President of the United States is supposed to know the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims. But somehow, as Richard Muller points out, nobody expects America’s commander in chief to know the differences between uranium and plutonium, or between gasoline and hydrogen.

That’s why he teaches “Physics for Future Presidents” at UC Berkeley, a course for non-science majors that Muller relishes as his opportunity to inform the business majors and liberal arts students who represent our future leaders. The longtime Cal physics professor turned his idea for the class into a textbook, and more recently into a popular book with the same title.

Now he’s on a roll. Muller was the featured speaker at Xconomy’s premiere event in San Diego Monday night, just a week or so after meeting with global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (He even got to fly home aboard the Google jet).

With “Physics for New Presidents” as his theme, Muller assumes a role that could be described as an equal opportunity “Debunker in Chief.” In rapid succession, he separates some core, inescapable scientific truths from the myths surrounding them. He started by dispelling fears sown by Dick Cheney about terrorists planting nuclear bombs on U.S. soil and ended by puncturing Al Gore’s inflated interpretations of the scientific evidence for global warming. Among the chestnuts he shucked:

—Nuclear bombs are extremely difficult to make, even for industrialized countries. Muller says he’s far more worried about another “low tech” terrorist act involving 60 tons of gasoline and a crowded football stadium on a Sunday afternoon.

—U.S. reserves of coal and oil shale far exceed the amount of crude oil remaining in Saudi Arabia and most other countries combined. “This is great news for energy independence and bad for global warming,” Muller says. Nevertheless, he says the United States should develop all of its energy resources, using “clean coal” technologies and other innovations to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

—The scientific consensus, presented by an authoritative study on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, concluded that the warming trend from 1850 to 1957 cannot be attributed to human activities. From 1957 to 2007, the study found a 90 percent likelihood that human activities caused a global average temperature increase of only about 1 degree Fahrenheit.

—Weather data do not show an increase in the number of hurricanes over the past century, nor do the data show an increase in the number of major category hurricanes. Today, hurricanes are detected by weather satellites and sensors in mid-ocean. Such observations were impossible before the first weather satellite was launched 49 years ago.

—Carbon dioxide emissions in developing countries, especially China and India, represent the biggest source of the predicted increase in greenhouse gases. It is a far more intractable problem in terms of curbing emissions, because coal is a cheap and bountiful energy source and clean energy technologies are too costly in comparison. “The only solution that I can think of is that we have to pay developing countries to use clean energy,” Muller says. Otherwise, they won’t use it.

As for energy development in the United States, Muller says his counsel is, “Don’t be greener than thou. Don’t bicker that ‘My technology is greener than yours. ‘ We need all of them. We need clean coal. We need nuclear. We need solar and wind. We need them all.”

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If President Obama ever has a question about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, he can just pick up his Presidential Blackberry and call or e-mail Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Of course, the President of the United States could just as easily call Richard A. Muller—the U.C. Berkeley professor who literally wrote the book on Physics for Future Presidents. He also was a leading member of the Berkeley team that theorized how an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Now Xconomy has tapped Muller and his talent for eye-opening explanations as the featured speaker at our San Diego premiere event. We are hosting the MacArthur “genius” award-winning physicist as the inaugural speaker for our Xconomy Forums here, to be held Monday at 4 p.m. at UCSD’s Institute of the Americas Complex. If you’re interested in attending, you can register here.

The book Physics for Future Presidents grew out of Muller’s popular class for non-science majors at Cal—which was voted “The Best Class at Berkeley” last year in a readers’ poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Californian. Muller’s book and lectures have gained renown for explaining the important science underlying terrorism, energy, electric cars, nukes, space, and global warming—and for empowering our electorate with a better understanding of science and technology.

Please join us Monday afternoon to hear this engaging presentation by one of the foremost speakers on science and technology. I hope to see you there.

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American Science and Engineering, based in Billerica, MA, announced yesterday that it has received a $6.2 million contract from the NATO C3 Agency to deliver its X-ray screening systems for cargo and vehicles to security checkpoints. AS&E’s Z Portal and other inspection technologies compete in the same space as Acton, MA-based Passport Systems.

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Many modern office buildings have smart-card-based electronic locking systems, where users wave their cards over an RFID sensor panel that checks the IDs on the cards against a central database. But this security layer usually stops at the front entrance. Installing the wiring for the access-control panels needed to make individual offices secure can cost up to $10,000 per door, so most companies just don’t do it—meaning that once someone is inside a building, they can usually roam unchallenged.

But a company called CoreStreet in Cambridge’s Alewife neighborhood is developing an alternative that could reduce the cost of a smart-card-based lock to $1,000, making it easier to imagine deploying electronic locks on internal doors. The system works by replacing hard-wired sensor panels with stand-alone, battery-powered locks and turning workers—or rather, the cards they’re carrying—into the network connecting them.

“The idea behind a ‘card-connected network’ is that the interface between the building’s control software and the standalone locks is the card itself,” says Chris Broderick, CEO of CoreStreet, which was founded in 2002 to commercialize identity-authentication technologies developed by MIT computer scientist Silvio Micali. CoreStreet announced on September 24 that it’s developing the card-connected security technology in partnership with Kaba Group, the Switzerland-based owner of Kaba-Ilco, which makes keymaking machines as well as punch-code and card-activated locks for industrial facilities, hotels, and shipping containers. The system should be available for purchase and installation next year.

In a card-connected network, Broderick says, information such as ID codes proving that cardholders have access privileges and the latest list of invalid cards is written onto employees’ cards every time they pass the main wired RFID panel at a building’s entrance. Then whenever they present their cards at internal, standalone locks, this information is transferred via radio signals to the locks’ internal memory. Say an employee resigns from a company. Their ID number gets added to the master list of invalid cards, and as people go about their days, passing by a building’s internal locks, each lock’s list gets updated. If someone then tries to use the old employee’s card, the internal locks won’t open.

“People spend a lot of money on security for public spaces, but people’s office doors for the most part have no access control on them, or if they have locks, people have no idea who has copies of the key,” says Broderick. “We’re adding the ability to have access control in locations where people typically don’t do it.”

Broderick says all of CoreStreet’s products—which consist mainly of software and appliances for generating and processing secure digital certificates—revolve around Micali’s insights about how to compress security information about individuals and move it to the places where actual transactions occur, whether on a computer network, a mobile device, “or even all the way down to a local lock in a physical locking system.” But the product in development with Kaba is one of CoreStreet’s biggest forays into the commercial world; up to now, according to Broderick, 90 percent of the company’s business has been with government agencies, who have been rushing to meet post-9/11 requirements for smart-card-security on all government computer systems.

The new Corestreet-Kaba locks could help in a number of locations—even at remote locations such as the base station structures at cell phone towers. “One of our users is a very large telecommunications firm with 10,000 facilities in the U.S., some out in the middle of the desert,” Broderick says. “You can’t run a wire out there, so they have no existing electronic access control on these towers. They can’t tell you who has been in and out.” With the new system, such information would be transferred onto an employee’s key and loaded into a centralized database the next time the employee passes a wired reader. “Since people carry around all these cards anyway, it’s a great solution,” says Broderick.

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The next time you are waiting for your luggage at the airport baggage carousel and marveling at the security challenge posed by those hundreds of bags, consider this: somewhere between 9 and 11 million cargo containers come into the United States through its 361 seaports annually, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s roughly 2 billion tons of freight, making up 95 percent of the nation’s overseas trade. Anyway you look at it, port security represents a major vulnerability in the fight against terrorism. And today, some six years after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, unlike that airport luggage (as you’ve no doubt heard) only a fraction of the shipping containers entering the United States are fully inspected to make sure they aren’t carrying weapons of mass destruction or other contraband.

That’s where a fast-growing, Acton, MA-based startup called Passport Systems comes in. The company is designing and building new cargo screening detection devices with technology developed at MIT. Its first target: the nation’s seaports. The privately held firm was founded nearly five years ago, in 2002, by a group led by well-known venture capital investor Gordon Baty, a retired director and co-founder of ZeroStage Capital (all told it has raised some $3.4 million in two rounds of venture financing). To date, the firm has also garnered more than $15 million in U.S. government contracts to develop two related detection systems that can automatically determine the “nuclear fingerprint” of a shipping container’s contents within 20 seconds.

The technology won’t be cheap to develop or build. But Passport Systems believes the added security will be well worth the price. The whole reason the firm exists, says Gustavo Bottan, VP for business development, is because its founders, including MIT physicist William Bertozzi, “saw the potential for using new technology to solve a very significant problem.”

Bertozzi’s brainstorm occurred to him in his MIT lab not long after the Lockerbie terrorist explosion of a Pan Am jet in 1988. Bertozzi says the incident spurred him to use his knowledge of nuclear physics to try to combat terrorism. The result was a technique called Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence, or NRF, that uses gamma rays to detect the unique atomic makeup of any cargo materials with atomic weights higher than that of helium. Bertozzi and MIT won two broad patents on all uses of NRF technology, and Passport Systems obtained exclusive rights to the technology.

Bertozzi’s NRF technique capitalizes on the ability of the tiny-wavelength gamma rays in a high-energy photon beam to penetrate the steel walls of the containers, and the fact that the nucleus of every atom, when excited by the rays, displays a unique fingerprint that can be detected by a specially designed spectrometer. As a result, the technique can theoretically tell the difference between even isotopes of the same material, distinguishing, for instance, between depleted uranium (U-238) and the enriched uranium (U-235) capable of being used in a nuclear device. As Bottan explains, this capability can be crucial in limiting false positives. Other sophisticated detectors, he notes, might be able to determine that a container holds a metal with a high atomic number, indicating either nuclear materials or the metals, such as lead and tungsten, that might be used to shield them. “But do you evacuate the port?” he asks. NRF scanning could, in a matter of seconds, determine that a container didn’t just have lead shielding, but that it held enriched uranium. In that case, Bottan says, “you’d have plenty of information right away to know you had a serious problem.”

Currently, Passport Systems is involved in trying to meet last year’s mandate by the U.S. Congress that all incoming cargo to the nation’s seaports be screened for radioactive materials by the year 2011. In the so-called CAARS Program (Cargo Advanced Automated Radiography System), the U.S. Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has awarded more than $1 billion in contracts to three large firms to accomplish the task: New York City-based L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and American Science & Engineering Inc. (AS&E) of Billerica, MA. Passport Systems is designing a module for AS&E’s detector system that will automatically sound an alarm when the system detects any nuclear threat, shielded or otherwise. The contracts stipulate that these systems be ready to enter a production phase by mid- to late 2009.

In addition to its work on the CAARS program, though, Passport Systems is working on its own to take full advantage of the company’s patented NRF technology with a system that will allow complete, real-time cargo identification. The graphic shows one conception of the company’s plan in which the shipping containers are driven on trucks through an automated detection system. The firm recently won a U.S. government “proof-of-concept” contract worth a possible $9.8 million for what the government considers a “transformational technology” that will use spectrometers to give inspectors a real-time read-out of the contents of a container or cargo hold. Passport Systems’ 23-person team in Acton is actively at work on the system. Bottan stresses that the technology itself is proven, but the focus now is toward the creation of a prototype that can reliably scan containers fast enough to avoid impeding the flow of cargo.

Adding to the degree of difficulty, the Passport Systems detection system must be safe enough to pose no threat of radiation exposure to operators. According to Bottan, the government requires that any seaport cargo screening system must emit so little residual radiation that a pregnant woman could safely be in the vicinity of the scanner.

Still, Bottan is optimistic. He says Passport Systems is designing its state-of-the-art NRF scanner to ultimately work either as a stand-alone detection system or as an add-on to complement detection systems already in place. And, he says, “We think we’re on track to meet all the government’s requirements.”

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