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Researchers from James Cook University and the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgiumsay unprecedented oceanographic conditions in 2016 produced the perfect storm of factors that lead to a mass coral bleaching.

JCU’s Professor Eric Wolanski said even in very warm years with a summer el Nino event, such as 1998, there was no massive coral bleaching in the Torres Strait and only small to moderate bleaching in the northern Great Barrier Reef.

The chips in most modern desktop computers have four “cores,” or processing units, which can run different computational tasks in parallel. But the chips of the future could have dozens or even hundreds of cores, and taking advantage of all that parallelism is a stiff challenge.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new system that not only makes parallel programs run much more efficiently but also makes them easier to code.

In the past, climate scientists have tended to underestimate the risk of a co-occurrence of heatwave and drought. This is the conclusion of one of the first studies to examine compound climate extremes.

When organic chemists identify a useful chemical compound — a new drug, for instance — it’s up to chemical engineers to determine how to mass-produce it.

There could be 100 different sequences of reactions that yield the same end product. But some of them use cheaper reagents and lower temperatures than others, and perhaps most importantly, some are much easier to run continuously, with technicians occasionally topping up reagents in different reaction chambers.

Two NASA satellites provided a look at the Northwestern Pacific Ocean's latest tropical storm from outside and inside. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided an outside look at Nanmadol when it's maximum sustained winds peaked, and the GPM Core satellite provided an inside look at the rainfall within the storm.

Before consolidating into the fifth depression of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean's hurricane season, Nanmadol was a low pressure system designated System 99W. That low pressure area developed and was renamed Nanmadol on July 2.