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Enlarge / If this road is your only route to the outside world, it might not matter that your house didn't flood. (credit: Maurice Alcorn / EyeEm)
Climate change produces lots of risks that are difficult to predict. While it will make some events—heatwaves, droughts, extreme storms, etc.—more probable, all of those events depend heavily on year-to-year variation in the weather. So, while the odds may go up, it's impossible to know when one of these events will strike a given location.
In contrast, sea level rise seems far simpler. While there's still uncertainty about just how quickly ocean levels will rise, other aspects seem pretty predictable. Given a predicted rate of sea level rise, it's easy to tell when a site will start ending up underwater. And that sort of analysis has been done for various regions.
But having a property above water won't be much good if flooding nearby means you can't get to a hospital or grocery store when you need to or lose access to electricity or other services. It's entirely possible for rising seas to leave a property high, dry, but uninhabitable as rising seas cut connections to essential services. A group of researchers has analyzed the risk of isolation driven by sea level rise, and shows it's a major contributor to the future risks the US faces.
Piecing together why so many people are willing to share misinformation online is a major focus among behavioral scientists. It's easy to think partisanship is driving it all—people will simply share things that make their side look good or their opponents look bad. But the reality is a bit more complicated. Studies have indicated that many people don't seem to carefully evaluate links for accuracy, and that partisanship may be secondary to the rush of getting a lot of likes on social media. Given that, it's not clear what induces users to stop sharing things that a small bit of checking would show to be untrue.
So, a team of researchers tried the obvious: We'll give you money if you stop and evaluate a story's accuracy. The work shows that small payments and even minimal rewards boost the accuracy of people's evaluation of stories. Nearly all that effect comes from people recognizing stories that don't favor their political stance as factually accurate. While the cash boosted the accuracy of conservatives more, they were so far behind liberals in judging accuracy that the gap remains substantial.
The basic outline of the new experiments is pretty simple: get a bunch of people, ask them about their political leanings, and then show them a bunch of headlines as they would appear on a social media site such as Facebook. The headlines were rated based on their accuracy (i.e., whether they were true or misinformation) and whether they would be more favorable to liberals or conservatives.
A combination of space junk and a growing constellation of functional satellites like SpaceX's Starlink have astronomers worried about the potential for orbital materials to interfere with observations. And justifiably so, given that researchers are currently arguing over whether one observation represents one of the farthest supernovae ever observed or a spent Russian booster.
This clutter is obviously a big problem for ground-based observatories, which sit below everything in orbit. But several observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, sit in low-Earth orbit, which places them below many satellites. And a new survey of Hubble images shows that it's capturing an increasing number of satellite tracks in its images. So far, this hasn't seriously compromised its science, but it clearly shows that orbiting observatories aren't immune to these problems.
The work came from a citizen science project, the Hubble Asteroid Hunter, which organized volunteers to search for the tracks asteroids left in long-exposure Hubble observations. If an asteroid happens to pass through Hubble's field of view during this exposure, it can leave a short streak in the resulting image. But the participants started noting that some of the streaks they were seeing crossed Hubble's entire field of view during a single image (the project maintains a forum where the volunteers can discuss their work).
Enlarge / Each of those white structures contains lots of batteries that were built for cars. (credit: B2U)
Last week, a company called B2U Storage Solutions announced that it had started operations at a 25 Megawatt-hour battery facility in California. On its own, that isn't really news, as California is adding a lot of battery power. But in this case, the source of the batteries was unusual: Many of them had spent an earlier life powering electric vehicles.
The idea of repurposing electric vehicle batteries has been around for a while. To work in a car, the batteries need to be able to meet certain standards in terms of capacity and rate of discharge, but that performance declines with use. Even after a battery no longer meets the needs of a car, however, it can still store enough energy to be useful on the electric grid. So it was suggested that grid storage might be an intermediate destination between vehicles and recycling.
But there are some significant technical and economic challenges to implementing the idea. So we talked with B2U's CEO, Freeman Hall, to find out why the company decided it was the right time to put the concept into action.
Enlarge (credit: VICTOR de SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)
Psychedelic drugs are often used for entertainment purposes. But there have been some recent indications that they can be effective against PTSD and treatment-resistant depression. Figuring out whether these substances work as medicinal drugs can be challenging because (as one researcher helpfully pointed out) it's difficult to do a controlled experiment when it's easy to figure out who's in the treatment group. Still, we've made some progress in understanding what's happening with psychedelics at the molecular level.
Many psychedelics seem to bind to a specific receptor for the neural-signaling molecule serotonin, activating it. That would seem to make sense for antidepressive effects, given that many popular antidepressants also alter serotonin signaling (such as in SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But SSRIs don't produce any of the mind-altering effects that drive non-medical interest in psychedelics, so things remain a bit confusing.
New data suggests that psychedelics may activate serotonin signaling in a very different way than serotonin itself can, reaching the receptors in parts of the cell that serotonin can't get to.
Enlarge / In Texas, solar facilities compete for space with a whole lot of nothing.
Earlier this week, the US' Energy Information Agency (EIA) gave a preview of the changes the nation's electrical grid is likely to see over the coming year. The data is based on information submitted to the Department of Energy by utilities and power plant owners, who are asked to estimate when generating facilities that are planned or under construction will come online. Using that information, the EIA estimates the total new capacity expected to be activated over the coming year.
Obviously, not everything will go as planned, and the capacity estimates represent the production that would result if a plant ran non-stop at full power—something no form of power is able to do. Still, the data tends to indicate what utilities are spending their money on and helps highlight trends in energy economics. And this year, those trends are looking very sunny.
Last year, the equivalent report highlighted that solar power would provide nearly half of the 46 gigawatts of new capacity added to the US grid. This year, the grid will add more power (just under 55 GW), and solar will be over half of it, at 54 percent. In most areas of the country, solar is now the cheapest way to generate power, and the grid additions reflect that. The EIA also indicates that at least some of these are projects that were delayed due to pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions.
Enlarge / Those lab coats aren't going to protect you from your own biases. (credit: Caiaimage/Robert Daly)
It's no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences which evidence people will accept. But it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making in the face of a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the US. Yet a large number of studies have shown that stances on COVID vaccination and death rates, among other things, show a clear partisan divide.
And it's not just the general public having issues. We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.
Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgments even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study.
Enlarge (credit: Andrea Nissotti / EyeEm)
On Saturday afternoon, US jets intercepted the Chinese surveillance balloon as it was leaving the continental US. Live footage of the event shows contrails of aircraft approaching the balloon, followed by a puff of smoke that may indicate the explosion of some ordnance near the balloon's envelope—a reporter is heard saying "they just shot it" in the video embedded below. The envelope clearly loses structural integrity shortly afterwards as it plunges towards the ocean. Reportedly, the events took place near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Here's video of it being shot down near Myrtle Beach via Katie Herrmann #ChineseSpyBalloon pic.twitter.com/KmT9rL2bR7
— Brad Panovich (@wxbrad) February 4, 2023
Shortly afterwards, the US Department of Defense (DOD) released a statement attributed to its Secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, that confirmed the interception was performed by US fighter jets on the order of President Biden. The DOD identifies the hardware as a "high altitude surveillance balloon," and says that the President authorized shooting it down as early as Wednesday. The military, however, determined that this could not be done without posing a risk to US citizens, either due to debris from the balloon itself, or from the ordnance used to destroy it.
As a result, the military waited until the balloon was far enough offshore to no longer pose a risk to land, but close enough that it would fall within US territorial waters, ensuring that the country would be the first to recover any hardware that survived the plunge into the sea. Secretary Austin also thanked Canada for its assistance in tracking and intercepting the balloon through the countries' cooperative North American defense organization, NORAD.
Enlarge / The Nicobar pigeon, the dodo's closest living relative, is quite a bit smaller and capable of flight. (credit: Samuel Hambly / EyeEm)
Colossal is a company that got its start with a splashy announcement about plans to do something that many scientists consider impossible with current technology, all in the service of creating a product with no clear market potential: the woolly mammoth. Since that time, the company has settled into a potentially viable business model and set its sights on a species where the biology is far more favorable: the thylacine, a marsupial predator that went extinct in the early 1900s.
Today, the company is announcing a third de-extinction target and its return to the realm of awkward reproductive biology that will force the project to clear many technical hurdles: It hopes to bring back the dodo.
The dodo was a large (up to 1 meter tall), flightless bird that evolved on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. As European sailors reached the islands, it quickly became a source of food for them and the invasive species that accompanied them. It went extinct within a century of the first descriptions reaching Europe.
Enlarge (credit: Robert Trevis-Smith)
It's pretty easy to link humans' intelligence to our success as a species. Things like agriculture, building cities, and surviving in harsh environments require a large collection of mental skills, from good memory to the ability to communicate and work together. But it's often less clear what role intelligence plays in species with less obvious mental capabilities. In many cases, it's hard to even measure mental capacities; in other cases, it's hard to guess which capacities might improve survival.
A new study looks at a bird species that doesn't have much of a reputation for braininess: the pheasant. But the researchers behind the study find that pheasants have substantial differences in spatial thinking, and some aspects of that spatial capacity make a difference when the birds are released into the wild. Those birds that do well with navigating a complex maze adopted a larger home territory and did better at avoiding being eaten. And, almost as an accident, the study finds that the birds tend to get eaten more often when they wander out of familiar territory.
Parrots and corvids have reputations as the brainiacs of the bird world. Pheasants, not so much. But they do have advantages for the study of mental abilities. They're easy to raise in captivity, where they can be given various tests, and will adjust easily if released into the wild. They're also big enough that it's easy to attach tracking devices to see what they're doing after they've been released.
Off in the southwest, the last colors of sunset lit up the rim of the sky, as a crescent Moon and two planets lined up above. It was a gorgeous scene, but one that everyone was ignoring. Instead, all eyes were focused on a bright patch of artificial light on a barrier island a couple of miles away. The lights there were focused on a small, slender needle—small enough to be hauled to the launch pad by a pickup truck.
For years, the Electron rocket and the company behind it had been stuck in limbo at the Virginia launch site, waiting on various approvals—for regulatory agencies to share enough paperwork with each other to convince everyone that the launch was safe. Then weather and the end-of-year holidays kept pushing the launch back. But on Tuesday, everything went as smoothly as it is possible to imagine, and the Electron shot to orbit almost as soon as the launch window opened.
The launch is critical for Rocket Lab, which in some ways invested the future of the company in its Virginia operations. But it's also critical for the launch site, which is billed as a spaceport but hasn't seen much traffic leaving Earth.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
It's fair to say that, once the pandemic started, sharing misinformation on social media took on an added, potentially fatal edge. Inaccurate information about the risks posed by the virus, the efficacy of masks, and the safety of vaccines put people at risk of preventable death. Yet despite the dangers of misinformation, it continues to run rampant on many social media sites, with moderation and policy often struggling to keep up.
If we're going to take any measures to address this—something it's not clear that social media services are interested in doing—then we have to understand why sharing misinformation is so appealing to people. An earlier study had indicated that people care about making sure that what they share is accurate, but they fail to check in many cases. A new study elaborates that by getting into why this disconnect develops: For many users, clicking "share" becomes a habit, something they pursue without any real thought.
People find plenty of reasons to post misinformation that have nothing to do with whether they mistakenly believe the information is accurate. The misinformation could make their opponents, political or otherwise, look bad. Alternately, it could signal to their allies that they're on the same side or part of the same cultural group. But the initial experiments described here suggest that this sort of biased sharing doesn't explain a significant amount of information.
Enlarge / The laser beam passes near the lightning rod on the Säntis Tower. (credit: TRUMPF/Martin Stollberg )
Lightning rods protect buildings by providing a low-resistance path for charges to flow between the clouds and the ground. But they only work if lightning finds that path first. The actual strike is chaotic, and there's never a guarantee that the processes that initiate it will happen close enough to the lightning rod to ensure that things will work as intended.
A team of European researchers decided they didn't like that randomness and managed to direct a few lightning strikes safely into a telecom tower located on top of a Swiss mountain. Their secret? Lasers, which were used to create a path of charged ions to smooth the path to the lightning rod.
The basic challenge with directing lightning bolts is that the atmospheric events that create charged particles occur at significant altitudes relative to lightning rods. This allows lightning to find paths to the ground that don't involve the lightning rod. People have successfully created a connection between the two by using small rockets to shoot conductive cables to the heights where the charges were. But using this regularly would eventually require a lot of rockets and leave the surroundings draped in cables.
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