• Better earthquake protection for buildings

    Researchers examine how buildings with externally bonded fiber-reinforced polymer composite retrofits withstood the 30 November 2018 magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Alaska. By assessing how these buildings held up, the researchers hope to help engineers construct buildings that stand up to natural disasters.

  • As planet warms, even little precipitation may disrupt road networks

    A new computer model shows that as more rain falls on a warming planet, it may not take a downpour to cause widespread disruption of road networks. The model combined data on road networks with the hills and valleys of topography to reveal “tipping points” at which even small localized increases in rain cause widespread road outages.

  • Extreme floods associated with distinct atmospheric patterns

    Extreme floods across the continental United States are associated with four broad atmospheric patterns, a machine-learning based analysis of extreme floods found.

  • Maths shows the nature of “tipping points” for climate, eco crises

    Humans need to be wary of breaching a “point of no return” that leads to ecological disaster such as loss of rainforests or irreversible climate change, according to the most detailed study of its kind.

  • Finnish students outperform U.S. students on “fake news” digital literacy tasks

    A recent study revealed students at an international school in Finland significantly outperformed U.S. students on tasks which measure digital literacy in social media and online news. The researchers suggest this may be due to the Finnish and International Baccalaureate curricula’s different way of facilitating students’ critical thinking skills compared to the U.S. system and curriculum.

  • Why do some people believe the Earth is flat?

    Why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, is the flat-Earth movement gaining traction in the twenty-first century? One expert says that, in part, it is due to a general shift toward populism and a distrust in the views of experts and the mainstream media. There is an “increasing distrust in what we once considered to be the gatekeepers of knowledge – like academics, scientific agencies, or the government,” she says. In this kind of environment, “it becomes really easy for once-fringe views to gain traction.”

  • A Seattle quake may cause more damage than expected to reinforced concrete

    Using ground motions generated for a range of simulated magnitude 9 earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, researchers are testing how well reinforced concrete walls might stand up under such seismic events. The walls may not fare so well, especially within the city of Seattle, the researchers say.

  • Forest fires accelerating snowmelt across western U.S., affecting water supplies

    Forest fires are causing snow to melt earlier in the season, a trend occurring across the western U.S. that may affect water supplies and trigger even more fires, according to a new study. It is a cycle that will only be exacerbated as the frequency, duration, and severity of forest fires increase with a warmer and drier climate.

  • The why, how, where, and what of earthquake early warning

    Earlier this year, Los Angeles became one of the first cities in the country to roll out ShakeAlert – a dedicated earthquake early warning system. Advanced warning of an earthquake has long been a goal for everyone from seismologists to local governments. Especially in cities like Los Angeles, located along the notorious San Andreas fault. But what about cities like Seattle?

  • U.S., Russia, China race to develop hypersonic weapons

    Russia and China have recently touted their progress in developing hypersonic vehicles, which fly much faster than the speed of sound, which is 767 mph. Hypersonic missiles are rocket-boosted to high altitude and may be launched from land, sea or air. Over the past 60 years, U.S. interest in hypersonic vehicles has waxed and waned. Now it seems the U.S. is back in the hypersonic effort in a serious way.

  • Using AI in future hypersonic systems

    A test launch for a hypersonic weapon — a long-range missile that flies a mile per second and faster — takes weeks of planning. So, while the U.S. and other states are racing to deploy hypersonic technologies, it remains uncertain how useful the systems will be against urgent, mobile or evolving threats. Sandia National Laboratories thinks artificial intelligence and autonomy could slash these weeks to minutes for deployed systems.

  • China: Determined to dominate cyberspace and AI

    China is chasing dominance in emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in both the private and military sectors, as a central part of its effort to be the leading global cyber power, Chris C. Demchak writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The rise of AI – a subset of cyber as are machine learning, quantum computing, and other new technologies – does not herald a new arms race equivalent to that of the Cold War. Rather, the concern should be on the profound disruption to the existing Westernized global order. In the 1990s, Western nations, led by the United States, created what Demchak calls a “Westernized national creation”: cyberspace. Cyberspace, however, has created a multitude of ubiquitous, embedded vulnerabilities whose easy exploitation directly accelerated the rise of an otherwise impoverished authoritarian and aggressive China. Today, no single democracy has the scale and sufficient resources alone to match the foreknowledge and strategic coherence of the newly confident and assertive China. There is thus a need to create a Cyber Operational Resilience Alliance (CORA) to provide the scale and collective strategic coherence required to ensure the future wellbeing and security of democracy in an overwhelmingly authoritarian, post-Western, cybered world.

  • “Metamaterials” may mitigate earthquake damage

    In the past decade scientists have been experimenting with metamaterials, artificial materials designed with periodic internal structures to give them properties not found in natural materials. Some of these materials can control waves propagating through them, filtering sound or deflecting light so that an object appears “cloaked” or invisible, for instance. Could this same principle be applied to controlling seismic waves?

  • Mozambique hit by another unprecedented tropical cyclone

    A few weeks after Cyclone Idai which wreaked havoc on central Mozambique (and eastern Zimbabwe), the country is dealing with another unprecedented event. Tropical Cyclone Kenneth made landfall in northern Mozambique on 25 April, near the border with Tanzania, in an area where no tropical cyclone has been observed since the satellite era. There is no record of two storms of such intensity striking Mozambique in the same season. It has now weakened into a depression.

  • California: Coastal impacts of climate change

    The United States Geological Survey (USGS) says that sea-level rise is going to wreak widespread destruction on California’s coastal communities, unless these communities take urgent action to mitigate to risks. “Even the storms today have significant risk to California’s coastline,” said Patrick Barnard, the lead author of the study. “There are about $12 billion in properties that are at risk of extreme storm today, but if you look out into the future, let’s say mid-century, those numbers roughly triple to about $30 billion of property at risk with just a little bit of sea level rise, and it goes up from there,” USGS researchers Patrick L. Barnard and colleagues write in Scientific Reports.