Drive across the top of the levee; come back along the levee’s “toe” slope; pause when a flood wall or obstruction crosses the levee; move to the next section. This has been the methodology for the Iowa Geological Survey team members the past several fall seasons as they survey the geological integrity of Iowa’s 900 miles of levees.

As the federal government shutdown enters its third week, host Ben Kieffer gathers various perspectives on the impacts its having in Iowa and across the country. We talk with Iowa State University cybersecurity professor Doug Jacobson about how Iowans may be at greater risk for fraud threats and University of Iowa professor and Iowa Flood Center Interim Director Larry Weber shares how shutdowns impact his and colleagues' federally-funded research.

This summer, University of Iowa (UI) PhD student Gage MacLin has been exploring one of aviation's most complex puzzles: how can autonomous aircraft safely operate alongside human pilots?

A University of Iowa PhD student has won a top research paper award for his investigation of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a toxic chemical banned decades ago.

As researchers race to find a new funding source before money runs out and they're forced to pull the sensors, a nonprofit has launched a crowdsource campaign to try to keep the program afloat.

The Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) recently held its 2025 Annual Science Meeting, with the University of Iowa actively participating to share its latest advancements in hydrologic modeling and flood prediction research.

The Iowa Geological Survey is examining flood levees in the Waterloo and Cedar Falls region as part of a statewide initiative.

The survey team was seen at Cedar Bend Park in Waterloo, continuing their work in the third year of a five-year directive to inspect Iowa's 900 miles of levees. They are using technology that penetrates 20 feet below the ground to analyze the composition of the levees and identify potential weak spots.

The Iowa Geological Survey is in the third year of a five-year project that involves essentially x-raying every single levee in the state. That adds up to roughly 900 miles of levees, all being checked to see what they are made of to ensure they hold up in the event of a flood. In Waterloo, if the levee near Cedar Bend Park were to fail, the elementary school on the other side could flood and homes could be damaged.

Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a class of fire-resistant industrial chemicals, were widely used in electrical transformers, oils, paints, and even building materials throughout the 20th century. However, once scientists learned PCBs were accumulating in the environment and posed a cancer risk to humans, new PCB production was banned in the late 1970s, although so-called legacy PCBs remain in use. Some bacteria may be able to give communities the freedom to flourish in a world free from PCBs.