An algorithm usually used to design profitable airline routes can plan the optimal approach to adding cycle lanes while staying within council budgets Technology Bike lanes could be made safer, more efficient and more affordable by using an algorithm originally intended to analyse social networks and work out profitable airline routes. Coaxing people out of cars and onto bicycles is a cheap and effective solution for many social ills: it cleans up toxic air, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, cuts congestion, lowers noise pollution and has a positive effect on health, lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Cities often have limited funds to create safe … Read More

annals-of-inquiry How the War in Ukraine Might End In recent years, a small group of scholars has focussed on war-termination theory. They see reason to fear the possible outcomes in Ukraine. Read More

Bears are not cats or dogs, and feeding them like they are likely shortens their lives. A new study in Scientific Reports on the diets of giant pandas and sloth bears adds more evidence that bears are omnivores like humans and need a lot less protein than they are typically fed in zoos. Read More

This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Swedish scientist Svante Paabo for his discoveries on human evolution. Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Committee, announced the winner Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Read More

STOCKHOLM — This year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Swedish scientist Svante Paabo for his discoveries on human evolution. Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Committee, announced the winner Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Read More

Many items enjoyed by people of all abilities were originally designed to help people with disabilities. Here are some inventions you may use every day that were originally for the disabled community. Read More

The nonprofit Coral Restoration Foundation runs the ocean’s largest coral nursery, where scientists raise coral to restore reefs. Jennifer Adler Coral reefs can protect coastal cities from deadly floods, if only we keep them alive. Hurricane Ian was not just a powerful storm, but a preview of what’s to come. Climate change is helping cyclones intensify faster, produce greater storm surges, and dump more rain — all of which makes hurricanes more destructive and expensive. One early assessment for Ian indicates it cost as much as $40 billion in property damage. Engineers have long defended against the threat of hurricanes by building structures like levees and seawalls. Yet these tools are imperfect. They can damage the environment, they don’t always hold the water back, and they can be pricey themselves. Steve Helber/AP Hurricane Ian destroyed a section of the Sanibel Causeway in western Florida. But for many communities, a simpler (and cheaper) solution could be a big help: restoring coral reefs. Coral reefs are among the many ecosystems, including mangrove forests and wetlands, that can protect us. They function like natural breakwaters during a hurricane, helping to dampen or “break” waves that can flood homes and offices near shore. The problem is that coral reefs are dying. Along with disease and pollution, climate change — the same force making hurricanes more damaging — has wiped out half of the world’s reefs. So to protect our coastal cities, scientists say, we should also protect and restore our coral reefs. What’s a coral reef worth? Across the US, coral reefs help safeguard the homes of more than 18,000 people and avert $1.8 billion in flood damage each year, according to a recent analysis by the US Geological Survey (USGS). Florida, home to the world’s third-largest barrier reef, receives a large chunk of those benefits. Reefs provide flood protection to more than 5,600 Floridians and prevent $675 million worth of damage to property and peoples’ livelihoods each year, the analysis found. Reefs reduce the amount of energy in waves by an average of about 97 percent, not unlike how a speed bump slows a car. Waves with less energy are smaller and slower and don’t deal as much damage when they reach the shore. Even just a small difference in a reef’s height can make a big difference in risk, according to a study published last year in the journal Nature. Flood risk is often measured by what’s called the 100-year-flood zone — an area in which the chance of a flood in a given year is 1 percent. If coral reefs in the US lose 1 meter of height, that zone in the US would grow by 104 square kilometers (or about 26,000 acres), putting about 51,000 more people at risk of flooding, the study found. That’s a big reason why losing reefs is so frightening. “These losses could escalate flood risk in just years to levels not anticipated by sea-level rise for decades or a century,” the authors of the Nature study wrote. Wilfredo Lee/AP Damaged homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers, Florida. Building coral barriers, with help from the world’s largest hurricane simulator On a sunny afternoon in April, I stood indoors in front of the only machine in the world that can create a Category 5 hurricane in a lab. Housed in a large building at the University of Miami on Virginia Key, it consists of a swimming-pool-sized tank, a wave generator, and a loud jet engine that pipes in hurricane-strength winds. That day, the simulator was filled with about a meter of water. And in the center was a submerged structure made of hollow, hexagonal tubes. Scientists use the simulator to test how well structures like this one (called a “seahive”) dampen wave energy, with and without coral on them. From a desk with three computer screens, a doctoral student turned on the machine. The jet engine whirred and, inside, ocean-like conditions appeared. Gusts of wind created texture over the water, which erupted in waves that slammed into the seahive — it was literally a storm in a glass box. Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, enters the hurricane simulator to secure a “seahive” structure for a demonstration. Scientists use the simulator to test structures like this in ocean conditions. When structures like the seahive have coral on them, they can more effectively reduce wave energy, in some cases reducing it by up to 95 percent, according to Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, a researcher at the University of Miami. Before the end of the year, Rhode-Barbarigos and other scientists plan to sink a few different structures, including seahives, in North Miami Beach. They’ll plant coral on some of them to test them in real-world conditions for the first time. The University of Miami’s restoration project is considered a “hybrid” approach because it involves a human-made structure and live corals. But dozens of initiatives around the world — and many in Florida — involve planting coral straight on dying or damaged reefs, as I reported in April. A key selling point for these projects is that they can help safeguard coastal communities against storms. Liv Williamson, a doctoral researcher at the University of Miami, picks up a baby coral. These tiny coral colonies are part of an experiment on disease. Researchers at the University of Miami and elsewhere have also been developing coral colonies that grow quickly and better tolerate rising ocean temperatures, disease, and predation, often with some out-there approaches. The idea is to regrow reefs with corals that can tolerate the forces that wiped them out. If coral reefs are so valuable, why don’t we pay more for them? The US spends roughly $500 million a year to limit coastal flooding and related threats, according to USGS. In some years, those numbers are much higher: The Army Corps of Engineers spent $15 billion in 2018, for example, on projects to prevent flood and storm damage. These figures make what cities spend to restore ecosystems look like pennies. The nation’s largest project to restore reefs, an initiative in the Florida Keys called Mission: Iconic Reefs, has received only around $5 million in federal funding. “Funds for disaster management and climate adaptation are tens to hundreds of times larger than funds for habitat conservation and restoration,” authors of the Nature study wrote. Joe Raedle/Getty Images Damaged homes and streets seen after Hurricane Irma passed through Big Pine Key, Florida, on September 13, 2017. That’s starting to change as government agencies look to reefs as a defense against tropical storms. One example is the seahive project, which was initially funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (which is in turn funded by the federalgovernment). The Department of Defense is also shelling out millions of dollars for coralrestoration through DARPA’s “Reefense” initiative. This is a big deal because it opens up an enormous new pot of money for reef conservation and restoration, said Andrew Baker, a coral researcher at the University of Miami who’s helping make corals more resistant to extreme heat. Ultimately, protecting and restoring coral reefs is about much more than safeguarding coastal cities. Though they cover less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans, reefs sustain about one-quarter of all marine life and half of all federally managed fisheries. It’s hard to think of a better example of how helping an ecosystem is also helping ourselves. Update, September 29, 5:35 pm: This story was originally published on May 4 and has been updated with information about Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in Florida on Wednesday, September 28. Read More

NEW YORK (AP) — A big catch of fish fossils in southern China includes the oldest teeth ever found — and may help scientists learn how our aquatic ancestors got their bite. The finds offer new clues about a key period of evolution that’s been hard to flesh out because until now scientists haven’t found many fossils from that era. In a series of four studies, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers detail some of their finds, from ancient teeth to never-before-seen species. Read More

Geneticist Svante Pääbo has been awarded a Nobel prize for his work on evolutionary genetics Health The 2022 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. More to follow More on these topics: Read More

“To look without fear,” the immense, flabbergastingly installed retrospective of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, at the Museum of Modern Art, persuades me that the man is a genius. There’s a downside to the concession—it dampens my quarrels of taste with certain items, among the show’s predominantly brilliant several hundred, that I do not like. Geniuses alter the basic terms of the fields of art or science which happen to engage them. Criteria that once applied no longer compel. The ground zero at MOMA is “art photography,” its former autonomy diluted in a tsunami of images from Tillmans, in wildly varying sizes, mediums, and formats, which are often mounted from floor to ceiling, and may less risk than exalt banality. Almost violently sociable, the work retroactively mainstreams such precedents as the stark intimacies of love and loss in photographs by Nan Goldin—though the irrepressibly positive-minded Tillmans is never as downbeat as Goldin. Fifty-four years old, the third child of parents who ran an export business in a city near Cologne, Tillmans soared to fame in the early nineties for work that he had begun a few years earlier: an ostensibly scattershot but, in truth, acutely selective documentation of soulful youths whom he encountered on night-life outings, chiefly in Berlin and London, before and during his art-school studies at Bournemouth, in England. As with Goldin’s unhappy couples, his party scenes are like panes of glass dropped through the middle of symbioses. Beholding, you are at once viewer and viewed, at instants that are well served by fast, blurry takes. (Tillmans employed a 50-mm. S.L.R. until he went exclusively digital, in 2012.) His initial body of work put him on the art-world map, but he has somewhat downplayed it in his choices for the present show, perhaps from exasperation at being lazily identified with... Read More

Early Jurassic ichthyosaur juveniles show predatory specializations, scientists at the University of Bristol have revealed. Their findings, published today in the Journal of Anatomy, suggest that physical differences in their snouts show they evolved to have different diets and were not competing for the same resource. Read More

The day before new U.K. chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-budget plan for economic growth, a pound would buy you about $1.13. After financial markets rejected the plan, the pound suddenly sunk to around $1.07. Though it has since rallied thanks to major intervention from the Bank of England, the currency remains volatile and far below its value earlier this year. Read More

While the full extent of Hurricane Ian's devastation is not yet known, here is how the storm compares to the most destructive hurricanes in Florida’s history. Read More

Extremely heavy rain fell in the hardest-hit provinces. About 75% more water is falling during the heaviest rainstorms in the region, according to a new scientific analysis. Read More

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A car drives through forest fire smoke along a highway in the Amazon on September 22. Purposely set fires are a major contributor to deforestation. Michael Dantas/AFP via Getty Images In Brazil’s election Sunday, President Jair Bolsonaro could be voted out. Here’s what that means for the Amazon. The Amazon rainforest is at a crossroads. Down one path, deforestation continues to accelerate, pushing the iconic forest closer to a dangerous, self-destructing tipping point. On the other, Brazil’s government renews its efforts to protect the Amazon, conserving an enormous amount of biodiversity and carbon. This weekend, Brazilian voters will help decide which direction the forest takes. On Sunday, the country is holding a presidential election, and the two frontrunners — right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro and former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — are expected to take vastly different approaches to the nation’s most beloved ecosystem. Polls this week show “Lula,” as he is widely known, with a large lead. If neither Bolsonaro nor Lula receives at least 50 percent of the vote Sunday, the election will go to a runoff at the end of October. Under President Bolsonaro, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has surged. Lula, meanwhile, has promised to crack down on illegal mining and help bring forest loss under control, as he did a decade ago when he was president. An analysis by the climate website Carbon Brief suggests that if Bolsonaro loses to Lula, annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon could be down by nearly 90 percent by the end of the decade. Amanda Northrop/Vox “Everything that Lula has said, and even his track record, would indicate that he’s going to undo the brutal regressions of the Bolsonaro regime,” Christian Poirier, program director at the nonprofit advocacy group Amazon Watch, told Vox. Few political issues have higher global stakes than the conservation of the Amazon. Felling the rainforest not only erodes a critical carbon sink, which helps suck planet-warming gases out of the atmosphere, but it also fuels climate change. Ongoing deforestation could also trigger a runaway reaction that may turn regions of the rainforest into a savanna-like ecosystem, stripping the forest of its many ecological benefits and natural wonders. What Bolsonaro did to the Amazon rainforest, briefly explained Brazil was once a poster child for conservation. For much of the past two decades, the nation protected Indigenous lands, cracked down on illegal logging, and began monitoring forest loss more carefully, resulting in a precipitous decline of deforestation — that is, less forest loss. In 2004, the Amazon lost a staggering 28,000 square kilometers (roughly 7 million acres), but by 2012, that figure had fallen to just 4,600 square km (1.1 million acres), according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE. The destruction remained relatively low over the next few years (though it crept back up after 2012, partly because Brazil weakened a law that requires private landowners to protect a portion of their land). Then, in 2019, Jair Bolsonaro came into power. He stripped enforcement measures, cut spending for science and environmental agencies, fired environmental experts, and pushed to weaken Indigenous land rights, among other activities largely in support of the agribusiness industry. “We’re witnessing a heartbreaking unraveling of that success,” Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, wrote in a blog post last year. Between August 1, 2019, and July 31, 2021 — a period that largely overlaps with Bolsonaro’s first three years in office — more than 34,000 square km (8.4 million acres) disappeared from the Amazon, not including many losses from natural forest fires. That’s an area larger than the entire nation of Belgium, and a 52 percent increase compared to the previous three years. Amanda Northrop/Vox “The Brazilian government is fully committed to reducing deforestation rates in Brazil, in particular in the Amazon,” a government representative told Vox. The representative pointed to how the environmental ministry increased the budget for enforcement in the last two years, adding that deforestation has declined in areas where enforcement is permanent. Brenda Brito, a researcher at the Brazilian research group Imazon, said that while the ministry’s budget did increase from 2020 to 2021, the government only spent a portion of it. “The amount actually used is the lowest in 20 years,” she said. “If you have funds but are not using them, it is another demonstration of lack of capacity or political will to combat environmental crimes.” International funds to address deforestation were also frozen in 2019 due to rampant forest loss under Bolsonaro’s watch, she added. Bolsonaro’soffice forwarded Vox’s request for comment to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. The ministry pointed Vox to a government task force, launched last summer, called Guardians of the Biome. It was set up to address illegal deforestation, forest fires, and criminal activity in the Amazon, an agency representative said. The spokesperson also said that deforestation declined between August 2021 and July 2022, compared to the previous 12 months. (INPE has yet to release official deforestation data for that period.) Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images A South American tapir, one of the Brazilian Amazon’s many mammal species. Regardless of these recent actions, the destruction has been immense and the consequences severe: About 17 percent of the Amazon rainforest is now gone, according to a report from 2021. Scientists estimate that if that number reaches 20 to 25 percent, parts of the tropical ecosystem could dry out, threatening the millions of people and animals that depend on it. The largest rainforest on Earth, the Amazon is home to a truly remarkable assemblage of species, including 14 percent of the world’s birds and 18 percent of its vascular plants. Many of them are found nowhere else. Losing organisms to deforestation erodes essential functions including the production of oxygen and storage of carbon, on which we all depend, and undermines scientific discovery. Many medicines are derived from Amazon plants, yet just a fraction of the forest’s species have been studied. What Lula would mean for the Amazon if he wins An icon of the left, Lula, who recently served time in jail on controversial corruption charges, has pledged to protect the Amazon. Critically, Marina Silva, a prominent environmental advocate and Lula’s former environmental minister, has endorsed him. That makes Lula the “greenest” candidate in the field, according to Observatório do Clima, an environmental coalition in Brazil. “It is a pity that the [current] government has neglected the preservation of the Amazon,” Lula said in a June radio interview. “We have to take care of the forest and the Amazonian people.” To show that he can succeed, Lula often points to his track record. When he came into power in 2003, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was at an eight-year high, at more than 25,000 square km (6.3 million acres). 2004 was even worse. “He inherited an environmental catastrophe,” Poirier said. Michael Dantas/AFP via Getty Images Fires burn in the state of Amazonas on September 21, 2022. Michael Dantas/AFP via Getty Images A pile of illegally cut logs in the forest in southern Amazonas, Brazil, on September 17, 2022. Then his administration — largely, at the direction of minister Silva — began implementing existing laws to safeguard the Amazon, including enforcing a law called the Forest Code, and getting various government agencies to work collaboratively to curb forest loss, Brito said. As the chart above shows, deforestation fell dramatically between 2004 and 2012, and Lula was in power for most of that time. “Let’s go back to doing what we’ve been doing,” Lula said in the radio interview. “We had reduced deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent.” Based largely on Lula’s past performance, Brito and other environmental advocates say this election could mark a turning point for the Amazon. However, it’s worth noting that, even under Lula, some amount of deforestation will continue, partly because it will take a while to ramp back up enforcement. The reality is that the bar is incredibly low — anyone is likely to be better for the environment than President Bolsonaro, according to environmental advocates. While Bolsonaro has pledged to end illegal deforestation within the decade, he can’t be trusted and is likely to continue opening up the forest to agribusiness if he’s reelected, they say. “What happened in the last few years was really a tragedy,” Brito said. “We need a change. Lula understands the importance of preserving the Amazon — because he did that when he was president.” Read More

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These days, the Hell Gate Bridge, which connects the Astoria neighborhood of Queens with Randall’s Island, is one of the more obscure New York City bridges, appreciated mostly by those who know it for being a good fishing spot. This was not always the case. When the bridge opened, in 1917, it was seen as a triumph of engineering. The steel-arch design inspired the engineers of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in Australia, and the Tyne Bridge, in Newcastle, England. (In 1991, this magazine ran a piece chronicling how the bridge had faded over the years, literally as well as figuratively—the bridge’s paint had, because of years of neglect, flaked in patches.) I recently talked to the artist Eric Drooker, who depicted the bridge in his cover for the October 10, 2022, issue, about his love of picturesque views and the time he spent hanging out with fishermen as a child. Do you have a particular relationship to bridges? When I was a kid growing up in lower Manhattan, I was mesmerized by the wild variety of bridges around the city. Through my bedroom window, I could see the Brooklyn Bridge off in the distance, and, when I grew older, I would walk across to Brooklyn. My first-grade class also walked across the Wards Island Bridge, on 103rd Street, over the Harlem River. [ No cars are allowed on it. ] I was psyched when I realized most of the bridges have a pedestrian footpath. Read More

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The Houston-based company operating the oil pipeline that ruptured off Huntington Beach last fall announced Saturday that the government has green-lighted its plans to repair the pipeline, raising the possibility it will be operational again early next year. Read More

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 4-0 Thursday on to adopt new rules to address growing risks of orbital debris to space exploration by shrinking the time to remove defunct satellites. The FCC voted to require post-mission disposal of low-Earth orbit satellites within five years. The agency previously recommended operators of satellites in low-Earth orbit ensure spacecraft re-enter Earth’s atmosphere within 25 years. Read More

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"You really can't describe to anybody what it's like to sit through a hurricane," says Clark, who also rode out Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm, in 2005. "It's almost like they describe the sound of a tornado, like listening to a train go by, except it doesn't pass on and it's over with. It just keeps going and going and going. You're hearing the popping and the crackling of the trees, and the fireworks from the power lines going down, popping and snapping. It's just a horrendous sound." During both storms, Clark wondered more than once if it was the end. The giant oak trees lining Richton's streets toppled in the brutal and relentless winds, which raged for hours. All it would take was for one of those trees to come crashing through the roof, or for the walls to succumb to the terrible force. Read More

Smoke and flames rise from a hill during a forest fire in Chongqing, China, on August 18, when the highest temperature recorded there was 112 degrees Farenheit. Chen Chao/China News Service via Getty Images China’s catastrophic summer shows its climate adaptation plans still have a long way to go. China just finished one of its most disastrous summers on record, with record-breaking heat, drought, and wildfires leading to water shortages even into the fall. More than 900 million people — or about 64 percent of China’s population — faced brutal heat waves alone, highlighting how much further the nation has to go to protect itself against worsening climate-related disasters. As weather historian Maximiliano Herrera told New Scientist magazine last month while the heat waves were ongoing, “There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China.” In at least 17 provinces, more than 240 cities saw temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit. (Normally, a metropolis like Chongqing, at the center of this heat wave in southwestern China, only sees temperatures as high as 92°F.) China’s largest river and freshwater lake mostly dried up, reaching record-low water levels due to drought, all while wildfires raged. As in the United States, while some places baked, others flooded. All this is taking place as China, the world’s largest current emitter of greenhouse gases, has positioned itself as a leader on mitigating climate change. With President Xi Jinping committing to net zero carbon emissions by 2060, China is already investing heavily into clean energy domestically and plans to stop financing coal-fired power plants abroad. However, while China has increasingly focused on carbon mitigation efforts over the last decade, the country is just beginning to seriously tackle the equally difficult question of adapting to the effects of climate change. China’scomplex geography and large landmass spanning various types of climate zones have always made it vulnerable to extreme weather events like droughts and floods. Due to the worsening factor of climate change, Beijing will need to step up its game to future-proof the country. As the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports emphasize, both mitigation and adaptation work is key to reducing vulnerability to climate change — and China still has a long road ahead of it. “The climate story is a China story” As Jeremy Wallace, a professor at Cornell University focusing on the effects of Chinese politics on climate and cities, told me, “The climate story is a China story.” China’s rapid industrialization and recent rise to becoming the second largest global economy was mostly fueled by coal. As a result, China was responsible for 27 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2019, the most in the world and greater than every country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union combined. That carbon-heavy energy load helped drive prosperity and historic poverty reduction, but there was a steep environmental cost for China, too, including major air and water pollution, desertification, ecological devastation, and the rise of extreme weather events. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images Anglers fish along the Huangpu River across from a coal-fired power station in Shanghai, China, on September 28, 2021. Mounting concern and political pressure, mostly internal and to a lesser extent international, forced Beijing to act. Over the last two decades,the Chinese government passed domestic climate legislation, and made commitments to the international community, most notably when it signed the 2015 Paris agreement. Scott Moore, director of China programs and strategic initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that the Chinese government acknowledged opportunity and risk, with the latter especially playing a big role in climate policymaking. “​Of the world’s large economies, China is probably the single most exposed to climate risk,” he said. The first factor is that many major cities, like Shanghai or Tianjin, are located in low-lying coastal or river valley areas that are vulnerable to flooding. Second, glacier melt from China’s portion of the Tibetan plateau is increasing floods downstream. And finally, China’s highly urbanized landscape, and the concentration of population and infrastructure that comes with that, makes China more vulnerable to disasters like floods. There’s self-interest, too. The Chinese governmentalso saw a huge opportunity in investing in the global clean energy market, which today is worth trillions of dollars. “China is the world’s largest investor, developer, deployer, and manufacturer of clean energy across the board,” said Michael Davidson, professor of global policy and engineering at the University of California San Diego. China invested $380 billion in renewable energy in 2021 alone, accounting for almost half of new renewable energy capacity worldwide. Because of entrepreneurship and large government subsidies, the country has built out an enormous domestic network of wind and solar plants, and become the global leader on electric vehicles. Ng Han Guan/AP Beachgoers walk near wind turbines along the coast of Pingtan in southern China’s Fujian province on August 6. These changes are reflected in the very air that people living in China breathe, with the air quality in cities like Beijing markedly improving over the past decade. “It’s hard to say that they’re lagging” on tackling climate change, Davidson told me, and indeed, a recent report by Carbon Brief found China’s carbon emissions have seen their longest decline in a decade. On the adaptation side, despite the severity of the current floods, far fewer people are dying today from floods in China than they used to. Floods are a historic problem in China, but because the Chinese government invested in flood control over the past two decades, the risk of death isn’t as high as it used to be, Moore told me, when the worst floods could kill people in the millions. The flood adaptation measures included the construction of large dams and reservoirs, but also the improvement of early warning systems and emergency management strategies such as evacuation. The dam projects came with sizable environmental and human costs, ironically, including the destruction of wetlands that may have otherwise absorbed floodwater. Floods in recent years have also called the effectiveness of megaprojects like the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project ever created, into question. The central government recently acknowledged the unintended side effects in its climate adaptation strategy, finally passing a wetlands protection law last year to not only conserve but restore wetlands.Chinais also increasingly embracing nature-based solutions like “sponge cities,” retrofitting and designing cities to better absorb floodwaters, which could help reduce the severity of future floods. Beyond its carbon mitigation efforts, the Chinese government also released an updated climate adaptation plan in June to better prepare the country by 2035. Its aims include improving early warning systems for extreme weather, shoring up food security, and boosting conservation efforts both inland and along the coast. Notably, the plan is a follow-up to a 2013 adaptation plan that heralded China’s “war on pollution” and led to China decreasing as much air pollution in seven years as the US did in three decades. This new plan will hopefully be similarly ambitious, because it aims to have a nationwide climate impact and risk assessment system by 2035. This would ensure major infrastructure projects consider potential environmental consequences, like the aforementioned dams used to control flooding and generate hydropower. China has a plan to adapt, but is it enough? Still, for whatever progress China has made toward mitigating climate change, its adaptation strategies may not be enough to meet the current moment. The consequences of climate change are coming faster than most governments, policymakers, and even scientists anticipated. “The reality we’re facing now is that the carbon emissions that are already in the atmosphere are baked in for a period of time,” said Jonas Nahm, professor of energy, resources, and environment at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Things are going to get worse before they get better, even if we do everything to meet the Paris agreement models.” STR/AFP via Getty Images Firefighters deliver water to residents due to a shortage amid a heat wave, in Loudi, China, on August 24. The realities of the baked-in effects of climate change were in full view in Sichuan, the southwestern province at the center of this summer’s heat wave and drought. Hydropower systems there faced a serious electricity shortfall due to reservoirs and rivers drying up. “For all of this sort of anticipation, and planning, China’s also scrambling to try to figure out how to respond to this in the same way that the Europeans are with all these rivers running dry,” Nahm told me. While hydropower makes up 16 percent of China’s total power production (almost equal to its other renewable energy sources combined), it’s more than 80 percent of Sichuan’s power production, and in fact, it usually has so much excess hydropower that it delivers a third of what it produces to the rest of the country. However, drought affected Sichuan’s hydropower generation, and because it couldn’t curb its power sharing with other provinces, rolling blackouts had to be implemented to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed by demand. Even as the drought eases, there are worries that Sichuan and other parts of China will face power shortages in the winter. “You’ve seen over the last several years that some of the existing infrastructure just isn’t prepared,” said Nahm. A key example of this is the South-North Water Transfer Project, the largest water diversion project in history, and perhaps even the most expensive infrastructure ever built, period. Built over the past two decades,the project aimed to bring water from water-abundant southern China to water-scarce northern China, which, despite containing around half the country’s population, only has about 20 percent of the country’s total water supply. Wan Zheng/Costfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images The Hongze Station, part of the South-North Water Transfer Project in Huai’an, Jiangsu province, in January. But at best, the South-North Water Transfer Project has served as a Band-Aid to buy the government more time, and has done little to solve the issue of water scarcity. More damning, it has actually worsened the issue of water pollution. As Jennifer Turner, director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, told me, water pollution doesn’t make the headlines like air pollution, but is probably China’s biggest environmental problem. And the water pollution problem is so bad that it actually exacerbates China’s water scarcity problem. The resources that went into this megaproject could have gone to less flashy solutions like better collection of rainwater and water recycling. Ultimately, Turner said, the Chinese government has to address both the short and long term if it wants to fix its water problems. China’s infrastructure issues go beyond just its water projects, however. Wallace, the Cornell professor, said China may also need to fundamentally rethink how it builds urban areas. As in the US, Chinese cities have a tendency toward sprawl that is more polluting and carbon-intensive. “Once you build the city,” Wallace said, “it’s really hard to go back, right?” There is some research to suggest that sprawling cities have to deal with more extreme heat events than do more compactly designed cities. In the meantime, UC San Diego’s Davidson told me, there are still things China could do to protect provinces like Sichuan from extreme weather in the future. For one, the central government could ensure that it has a more unified power system that can better respond to energy shocks, such as a spike in demand for air conditioning when it’s boiling hot. Another is better urban design: More efficient air conditioning, better insulation, planning, and cooling centers can help Chinese cities better cope when there’s a heat wave. China could also improve monitoring systems for extreme weather, support the agriculture sector, reevaluate current infrastructure projects, and bolster reforestation and flood control efforts to not only control flooding but also prepare for future drought scenarios. With the advent of its new 2035 climate adaptation plan, which will implement a road map to bolster China’s risk assessment and its “climate-sensitive sectors,” it appears the Chinese government is looking to implement many of these policies. But this will require upending what Nahm described to me as the economic and engineering approach that China has largely taken to its infrastructure up to this point, green or otherwise. Rather than building dams or water diversion systems, China will have to double down on nature-based solutions. Costfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images Workers plant new trees on a mountain in China’s Hebei province, on April 27, 2020. At an environmental conference in Beijing, Ge Le, director of the climate change and energy program at the Nature Conservancy in China, pointed to recent reforestation efforts in China and trying to integrate more greenery into cities, like the aforementioned sponge cities, as positive examples for China to expand on. She also brought up the oyster reef restoration projects in Alabama, which aim to strike a balance between ecological restoration, climate adaptation (as reefs function as seawalls), and commercial benefit for the communities that harvest oysters. To some observers, China’s catastrophic summer may appear to be an indictment of Beijing not having done enough to meet the current climatic moment. But the truth is that China has done a lot to mitigate the effects of climate change, as well as adapt to its effects. And while the Chinese government could certainly do more, the unveiling of the 2035 adaptation plan makes it clear that there is a lot more to come. The problem facing Beijing, then, is the same faced by Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere: Climate change is already here, and things are going to get worse before they get better. China, like the rest of the world, is going to have to buckle in and work harder than ever. Read More

At least one death is likely linked to the storm, which made landfall Wednesday afternoon as a Category 4 beast. Read More

A prototype computer built using a magnetic material called a skyrmion has been programmed to recognise handwritten digits. The approach could be particularly energy-efficient Read More

In “american (tele)visions,” a family from Mexico spends more time at Walmart than in their trailer, and Little Amal, a twelve-foot-tall puppet of a ten-year-old Syrian refugee, roams Harlem. Read More

In thin, two-dimensional semiconductors, electrons move, spin and synchronize in unusual ways. For researchers, understanding the way these electrons carry out their intricate dances—and learning to manipulate their choreography—not only lets them answer fundamental physical questions, but can yield new types of circuits and devices. Read More

According to the United Nations, about 50 million people are enslaved worldwide. Forced marriage, mainly affecting women and girls, often has gendered, patriarchal roots. Read More

Until recently, fingerprint science was restrained by a lack of satellite observations — records only documented the southern tip of Greenland, making it difficult to examine the oceans around it. The Greenland ice sheet covers almost 80% of the island country and contains enormous quantities of frozen water. The rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet is responsible for 20% of the current sea level rise globally, and a recent study predicted its disintegration would raise global sea levels by at least 10 inches, even if people stop burning fossil fuels. Read More

Hollywood apocalypses come in all shapes and sizes – zombified, post-nuclear, plague-ridden – so it says something that the European eco-fable Vesper can weave together strands from quite a few disparate sci-fi films and come up with something that feels eerily fresh. Lithuanian filmmaker Kristina Buozyte and her French co-director Bruno Samper begin their story in a misty bog so bleak and lifeless it almost seems to have been filmed in black-and-white. A volleyball-like orb floats into view with a face crudely painted on, followed after a moment by 13-yr-old Vesper (Raffiella Chapman), sloshing through the muck, scavenging for food, or for something useful for the bio-hacking she's taught herself to do in a makeshift lab. Read More

Weather drones can collect all types of information. But one sophisticated drone is about to launch in the U.S. and will, for the first time, share that data for research purposes. Read More

Waves on the Malecon in Havana, Cuba, on September 28 after the passage of Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in southwestern Florida just shy of a Category 5 storm. Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images How Hurricane Ian got so powerful — in just two days. On Monday morning, Hurricane Ian had wind speeds of 75 miles per hour. Just 48 hours later, those speeds had more than doubled. On Wednesday, as the storm made landfall in southwestern Florida, Ian’s wind hit 155 mph — just shy of a Category 5 storm, the most severe category for a hurricane. Such rapid growth is known by meteorologists as “rapid intensification.” It’s defined as storms whose wind speeds increase by roughly 35 mph or more in less than 24 hours. “Ian definitely met that criteria,” said Paul Miller, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University. While wind speed isn’t the only force that makes storms dangerous, hurricanes that rapidly intensify are especially worrisome. They can easily catch coastal communities off guard, giving them little time to prepare, Miller said. So how did Ian get so big, so fast? CIRA/NOAA Hurricane Ian churning over southwestern Florida on September 28. It’s an important question, as storms like this one are highly destructive and are likely to become more frequent in the years to come. What made Hurricane Ian strengthen so quickly There are three main ingredients that, when mixed together, can result in a rapidly intensifying hurricane: moist air, low wind shear (wind coming from different directions or at different speeds), and warm ocean water. “All three of those things create a favorable ecosystem for a hurricane to establish circulation and intensify,” Miller said. Ian had them all. As it developed several days ago, the storm system faced some disrupting winds, but there was little shear as it grew over the last few days, Miller said. And Ian has largely avoided a region of dry air in the Gulf of Mexico. (Had Ian hit Florida farther north, it might have deteriorated faster, he said.) Then there’s the warm ocean water. The Gulf of Mexico has been unseasonably warm this summer, according to the National Weather Service. And climate change is heating the Caribbean ocean by a little over 1 degree C (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) per century. “Even small changes — half a degree C, or a degree — can really make a big difference,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. Another reason why the ocean is so warm is that it’s been a relatively quiet hurricane season so far. As hurricanes churn through the Caribbean, they sap heat from the water and churn it up, making it colder and less favorable for rapid intensification, Miller said. “We’ve been able to let the Gulf sit and bake throughout hurricane season,” Miller said. “We haven’t had another storm yet this season to go through and cool off the Gulf through that mechanism. There’s this pristine Gulf of Mexico from a sea-surface temperature standpoint, and Hurricane Ian has been able to exploit that.” Rapidly intensifying storms are hard to predict, and thus hard to prepare for Forecasters have made big strides in figuring out where hurricanes will go. Storm track predictions that could only be made 24 hours in advance 20 years ago can now be issued 72 hours ahead. But it’s been tougher to anticipate how strong storms will get. (Case in point: As of Sunday night, Ian was forecasted to peak at 130 mph). That’s because there are so many factors that influence the intensity of a storm, and they can change rapidly over time and space. Recall that rapid intensification occurs when hurricanes pass over areas with calm, warm waters. But it isn’t just how warm the ocean is at the surface; how deep the heat goes matters too. Measuring the depth of warm water and predicting sea surface conditions can be tricky. Often it requires hurricane hunter aircraft to drop temperature sensors into the ocean ahead of the storm. With a limited view of a hurricane’s potential intensity, it’s more difficult to issue warnings and evacuation orders. That happened last summer when Hurricane Ida galloped toward Louisiana. The storm jumped from Category 2 strength to Category 4, with winds topping 150 mph, in less than a day. The sudden speed-up left little time to coordinate the logistics to get people out of the path of the storm. “We didn’t have the time with Ida to safely call for a mandatory evacuation where we would be putting over a million people on the road,” Collin Arnold, director of New Orleans Homeland Security and Emergency Management told WVUE Fox 8 last year. Win McNamee/Getty Images Traffic crawls along I-4 East in Four Corners, Florida, on September 27 as people evacuate the Gulf Coast in advance of Hurricane Ian’s landfall. Now it’s happening again with Hurricane Ian. In some parts of Florida, “It’s no longer possible to safely evacuate,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday. “It’s time to hunker down and prepare for this storm.” So predicting a storm’s intensity isn’t just an academic exercise, but a lifesaving tool. Better forecasts are part of why fewer people are dying in extreme weather events, even as those events become more destructive. But people also have to heed forecasts. And a hurricane’s impact doesn’t end when the storm blows itself out. Flooding can last for days, and as Puerto Rico has shown after Hurricane Fiona swept through last week, power outages can linger, compromising access to food, lighting, and clean drinking water. Floridians thus won’t be out of danger when the winds die down and the water recedes; they’re vulnerable at least until the lights come back on. Is climate change causing storms to grow faster? If climate change is warming the ocean, and warm oceans fuel storms like Ian, does that mean climate change is making storms grow more quickly? Possibly. According to a recent analysis of hurricane data by the Associated Press, there were about 25 percent more rapidly intensifying storms in the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern Pacific in the last 10 years compared to 40 years ago. Some past scientific studies have also shown that hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly in parts of the Atlantic in recent years. “As the oceans warm a little bit, you’re just gradually making [rapid intensification] more likely,” McNoldy said. Global warming could also help rapidly intensify storms in another way: Climate change tends to warm the land faster than the sea, forming a temperature gradient along coasts, said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. That gradient tends to favor rapid intensification of hurricanes along the Atlantic Coast, he said. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images Wind blows palm trees in Charlotte Harbor, Florida, on September 28, before Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwestern Florida. But it’s worth bearing in mind that intensification is a complicated process, Miller said. And other factors that affect these events (wind shear and air moisture) aren’t clearly linked to climate change, he said. “No one has 100 percent figured it out,” McNoldy said of intensification. Read More

Views of Hurricane Ian were relayed from the International Space Station as it flew over the storm. Read More

Neurons in a part of the brain involved in memory may be 10 per cent larger in superagers than others aged 80 or over Health “Superagers” – people aged 80 or over with exceptionally good memories – may have larger than expected neurons in a region of the brain that is critical for memory. With age, most people experience a gradual decline to their memory, but some maintain a remarkable ability to recall past events into their eighties or older, on par with people 20 to 30 years younger. Read More

“Grant had been through this kind of thing with Rufus before, climbing things, sliding down things, and getting a truck onto two wheels while exiting a Tulsa off-ramp.” Read More

Scientists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Dow have developed a breakthrough process to transform the most widely produced plastic—polyethylene (PE)—into the second-most widely produced plastic, polypropylene (PP), which could reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Read More

Transition metals and non-ferrous metals such as copper, nickel and cobalt are not only suitable as materials in engineering and technology, but also for a wide range of applications in electrochemistry and catalysis. Read More

The Federal Reserve announced Thursday that six of the nation’s largest banks would participate in a pilot climate scenario analysis exercise in 2023. Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo will undergo the exercise, which the Fed said will not have capital or supervisory consequences. The Fed plans to publish aggregate findings from the exercise but no firm-specific information. Read More

Abnormally hot water in the Gulf of Mexico helped Hurricane Ian gain strength. Rapidly intensifying major hurricanes are more likely as the Earth gets hotter. Read More

The Atacama skeleton has sparked intense controversy and, based on its appearance, speculation of alien origin since its discovery in 2003. But what is the real story behind this little skeleton? Read More

Danish Defense shows the gas leaking at Nord Stream 2 seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark, on September 27. Danish Defence/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images The undersea explosions in two gas pipelines from Russia exposed Europe’s vulnerabilities — just as the continent faces a looming energy crisis. European and NATO officials are blaming sabotage for three leaks in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 undersea pipelines running from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. EU officials did not dd anyone directly, but the allegation underscored the uncertainty around Europe’s energy standoff with Russia, and how volatile the continent’s energy security is as winter approaches. Officials detected significant drops in pressure in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline on Monday, and then detected another pressure drop on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which were ultimately determined to come from three separate leaks. Swedish seismologists have said underwater explosions caused these leaks. The Danish military released footage of gas from the pipeline bubbling to the surface of the Baltic Sea. Se video og fotos af gaslækagerne på Nord Stream 1 og 2-gasledningerne i Østersøen på https://t.co/pj96CN7CDB: https://t.co/7bgt8TljaH #dkforsvar pic.twitter.com/I1zEPaBLYO.— Forsvaret (@forsvaretdk) September 27, 2022 One leak in a major pipeline is a singular event; another from a twin pipeline in an entirely different location is even more unprecedented. Add to that the fact that both of these pipelines are the source of geopolitical tension spilling over from the war in Ukraine, and it makes it very difficult to interpret this as an accident or coincidence. Oh, and in case you weren’t convinced, the Nord Stream leaks happened as officials inaugurated the Baltic Pipe, a new gas route from Norway to Poland. “Deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is utterly unacceptable and will be met with a robust and united response,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, tweeted. “Deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is utterly unacceptable and will be met with a robust and united response.” Right now, though European and US officials are calling this a deliberate act, they have not directly laid out the potential suspects. Officials in several countries, including Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, are investigating the origins of the leak. But unofficially, many in Europe are accusing Russia of the sabotage, given the EU believes the Kremlin has a track record of trying to weaponize energy. Moscow likely has the capability and equipment to carry out such an operation, and an incentive to keep putting pressure on Europe as Vladimir Putin escalates his war effort. The Kremlin has called it “stupid and absurd” to blame Russia for the Nord Stream leaks — and is likely gleeful at the percolating conspiracy theories that blame the United States. In the immediate term, the Nord Stream pipeline leaks have little impact on European energy security. Nord Stream 2 never opened; Germany finally killed the project in the lead-up to the Ukraine invasion. Russia reduced and then entirely cut off Nord Stream 1, with Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas company, claiming technical issues prevented the delivery of gas, which no one really believes. Whoever is responsible, the Nord Stream leaks are a signal of just how precarious Europe’s energy situation remains. The leaks added to global uncertainty around access to energy and its cost. European countries have stored up natural gas and bought replacement supplies at a premium on the global market. But many European industries relied on cheap gas from Russia, and high costs are forcing industry cutbacks and closures with still-unfolding economic consequences. Countries and cities are trying to reduce demand by cooling swimming pools and turning off traffic lights. Households across the continent face higher energy bills, even as some fear gas shortages. That’s happening without another major disruption. Damaging the Nord Stream pipelines is a warning that any disruption to energy, whether by accident, an act of nature, or intentional, could deepen and prolong the energy crisis in Europe and beyond. “These attacks show that Europe does not have spare capacity in the energy system. It was already running up against that to begin with. Now this is an enormous vulnerability,” said Emily Holland, an assistant professor in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College. What we know (and don’t know) about the Nord Stream leaks The leaks — two in Nord Stream 1 and one in Nord Stream 2 — were detected in the Baltic Sea, off Bornholm, a Danish island. According to the Financial Times, German seismologists detected a spike in activity shortly before Danish officials detected the Nord Stream 2 leak. Swedish seismologists also registered activity, which they said was in keeping with an explosion, and not a natural event. It didn’t take long for officials in European states to conclude an act of sabotage, backed up by NATO. It probably wasn’t too hard of a conclusion to come to: Damages like these to undersea pipelines are rare, and for three to happen at the same time, on the same day, at the same time another gas delivery route to Europe opened? It’s hard to imagine this is all a big coincidence. Publicly, officials have cautioned against rushing to conclusions on who and why. “This is something that is extremely important to get all the facts on the table, and therefore this is something we’ll look closely into in the coming hours and days,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Privately, many officials have a culprit: Russia. Experts emphasized that we still don’t know for sure, and it may be hard to fully know Moscow’s motivation. But there are a few hints that point to the Kremlin. For one, Russia likely has the technical capabilities and equipment to pull off such an act, including potentially by divers or undersea drones. Russia is also intensifying its war effort in Ukraine; Putin implemented a mobilization effort that is facing resistance and chaos at home. Russia is still under heavy sanctions from Western countries, and the Kremlin has already used energy infrastructure — Nord Stream 1 specifically — as a tool to pressure the West. Russia may be trying to make clear that Europe won’t be getting gas from Russia — not this winter, not in the near future, and maybe not ever again. “It’s a signal that Russia is saying, ‘Fine, you don’t want our energy, find it somewhere else,” Holland said. It would be Russia’s final break in the relationship with Europe, to indicate now it has no choice but to get its energy elsewhere. Of course, Europe was largely doing that, and everyone knew Russia wasn’t sending any gas this winter. The Nord Stream pipelines are basically offline, so the immediate effects on supply are minimal. But the act of sabotage underscores the risk to other European infrastructure, like the now all-important pipelines from Norway. Norway and Denmark for example, have increased security around their own oil and gas infrastructure. Stefan Meister, an expert in EU-Russian relations at the German Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out that while European gas prices had gone down recently, a shock like the Nord Stream leaks could potentially rattle the energy markets once again, less for what it actually means and more for the reminder of how fragile the energy situation. After all, the Nord Stream pipelines are right now pretty useless to Russia, too. “That means [the way] to make use of it is to blow it up to impact the gas market,” Meister said. “It’s not on the current situation of the gas supply, but it’s more on psychology.” Why Europe is even more on edge The Kremlin itself has said the possibility of a deliberate attack can’t be ruled out, and spokesperson Dmitri Peskov said Russia was “extremely concerned.” The Russian foreign ministry also leaned into a conspiracy theory that the United States is behind the sabotage — fueled by a tweet from a former Polish defense minister and a clip of Biden from February saying Nord Stream 2 would be done if Russia invaded Ukraine. The US had reportedly warned allies this summer that intelligence suggested Nord Stream pipelines might be attacked, and has, of course, backed up European allies as they investigate. Some have floated Ukrainian sabotage, as a kind of false flag, but experts said Ukraine likely doesn’t have the technical know-how or equipment to do that. But, again, in some ways, the Nord Stream damage matters more for the risk it signals for Europe. “The supply situation is very tight. Every single molecule that we can find, we bring into Europe, at whatever price at the moment,” said Andreas Goldthau, an energy expert at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt. Europe has no choice but to do that because Russian gas made up about 40 percent of Europe’s gas supply at the start of the war; now it’s down to about 9 percent. Europe had to replace that gas from somewhere, and so it sought out alternative sources. That includes more pipeline gas from Norway and liquefied natural gas from around the world. But it doesn’t leave Europe with much room if another backup goes offline. Gazprom warned Wednesday it might cut off natural gas flowing through a Ukrainian pipeline to Europe. Other disruptions can happen, sometimes by accident. As Goldthau pointed out, US hurricanes could disrupt the LNG market, too. “There’s so much else that can go wrong, and now, on top of that, there is the pipeline situation,” he said. “And all of that is something that at least will, at some point, have an impact on the risk premium and on the futures market.” The fears that other energy infrastructure could go down may affect the markets, and that makes it pricier for Europe to get gas — but also has a destabilizing effect on the rest of the world, as energy prices rise, and lower-income countries have to compete for even more expensive gas. (And for the world: The full climate and environmental impacts of these leaks are still unclear, but the methane leaching from those pipes is a “powerful greenhouse gas.”) Beyond energy, infrastructure sabotage is the kind of hybrid warfare that many in the West worried about ahead of Russia’s invasion — cyberattacks, or other hacks on critical infrastructure. It’s unclear if Russia really has opened up a new front with the West as it wages its months-long war in Ukraine. But the Nord Stream leaks hint at an even more uncertain winter in Europe. Read More

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft rammed an asteroid at blistering speed Monday in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth. The galactic grand slam was set to occur at a harmless asteroid 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) away, with the spacecraft named Dart plowing into the rock at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph). Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit. Read More

Computer simulations found that a material made from three layers of rubber could absorb most frequencies used for sonar, which if affixed to a submarine would make it difficult to detect Read More

thank you,Adam I sent the e-mail late in the afternoon, while working at my family’s antiques store. An hour later, a reply arrived in my in-box: You need to simply ask for help and give people an out. Read More

A comprehensive analysis of bacterial communities from Deception Island, an active volcano in Antarctica, highlights the potential for using heat-loving bacteria to clean up oil contamination, new research led by KAUST researchers shows. Read More

An enzyme called Fic, whose biochemical role was discovered at UT Southwestern more than a dozen years ago, appears to play a crucial part in guiding the cellular response to stress, a new study suggests. The findings, published in PNAS, could eventually lead to new treatments for a variety of diseases. Read More

Hurricane Ian made landfall on Florida's southwestern coast Wednesday as a strong Category 4 storm, making it one of only 15 Category 4 or 5 hurricanes on Read More

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