Marta Meana, UNLV acting president, attends an editorial board meeting at the Las Vegas Sun offices Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2018.

The Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems has launched the Nevada Drone Center of Excellence for Public Safety. Together with the FAA, it’s overarching purpose is to combat frequent drone incursions on public and private airspace, as well as educate residents and provide workshop sessions to promote safe and legal drone use as the number of registered UAVs in the country continues to grow.

If you regularly watch TV, you’ve probably seen a cartoon bear pitching you toilet paper, a gecko with a British accent selling you auto insurance and a bunny in sunglasses promoting batteries.

For this blog, in a post first published at Howe on the Court, Amy Howe reports that “[t]he Supreme Court declined to intervene [yester]day in a lawsuit filed by a group of 21 children and teenagers who allege that they have a constitutional right to a ‘climate system capable of sustaining human life.’” Additional coverage comes from Lawrence Hurley at Reuters, Timothy Cama at The Hill, John Siciliano at the Washington Examiner, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Mary Papenfuss at Huffpost, and Lyle Denniston at his eponymous blog, who reports that “[i]n refusing as ‘premature’ the Administration’s multiple requests to thwart the lawsuit, the order issued by the Court … called the basic constitutional claim in the case ‘striking’ in its breadth, and commented that there are ‘substantial grounds for difference of opinion’ about whether the case was simply too ambitious even to be allowed to proceed in court.”

The “third” estimate for U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP) for the first quarter of 2018 expanded at a 2.0 percent annualized rate, revised down from the second estimate of 2.2 percent. The downward revisions mainly reflected smaller-than-expected private inventory investment and personal consumption expenditure. U.S. nonfarm employment continued its surprising gain by adding 213,000 jobs in June.

It's tough to create the perfect lunch-break read. Ideally, the article takes less than 30 minutes to read, and you don’t have to be an academic to understand it. Maybe it’s thought-provoking enough that you can’t concentrate on eating. Then you send it to a friend.

Diversification became the buzz word for Nevada after the Recession, because the state wanted an economy that could survive if gaming failed.

There's a potential new, modern way to utilize one of the nation's greatest engineering feats. Hoover Dam, an engineering marvel of the 20th century made of concrete and steel continues to generate a significant amount of energy to power the southwest, but it may eventually serve another purpose.

The Hoover Dam was a 20th Century marvel but engineers say it is time for the dam to hit its full potential.