• NASA Eyes Hurricane Michael Moving Inland

    NASA’s Aqua satellite and NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP Satellite passed over the Florida Panhandle and captured different views of Hurricane Michael after it made landfall on Oct. 10.  Hurricane Michael is the most powerful storm on record to hit the Florida Panhandle.

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  • How Hurricane Michael Got Super Big, Super Fast

    Michael introduced itself to North America with 155-mile-per-hour gusts of wind and a barometric pressure of 919 millibars, the third-strongest hurricane to ever make continental US landfall. It was a monster, and it stayed a monster as it rolled through Georgia and then on toward the Carolinas.

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  • Link between Gut Flora and Multiple Sclerosis Discovered

    Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s own immune system attacks and damages the protective coating around nerve cells. This coating is made up of myelin – a biological membrane of protein and fatty substances – which is why research efforts to find the disease’s target antigen have so far focused on the myelin membrane’s components. New findings made by the research group of Mireia Sospedra and Roland Martin from the University of Zurich’s Clinical Research Priority Program Multiple Sclerosis now suggest that it is worth broadening the research perspective to gain a better understanding of the pathological processes.

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  • Measuring Glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains

    Technology pioneered in Antarctica could soon be providing much-needed data on the amount of ice in the glaciers of High Mountain Asia thanks to an ingenious helicopter-mounted, low-frequency radar developed by researchers at British Antarctic Survey.

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  • Geoengineering, Other Technologies Won’t Solve Climate Woes

    The countries of the world still need to cut their carbon dioxide emissions to reach the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. Relying on tree planting and alternative technological solutions such as geoengineering will not make enough of a difference.

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  • New Technique for Turning Sunshine and Water into Hydrogen Fuel

    A research team led by DGIST Professor Jong-Sung Yu’s team at the Department of Energy Science and Engineering has successfully developed a new catalyst synthesis method that can efficiently decompose water into oxygen and hydrogen using solar light. It is expected that this method will facilitate hydrogen mass production due to higher efficiency than the existing photocatalyst method.

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  • Physical Activity Has Respiratory Health Benefits for Smokers, Regardless of Air Pollution Levels

    Regular physical activity is associated with better lung function among current smokers in European cities, regardless of air pollution levels. This is the main conclusion of a new study comprising over 4,500 people from nine European countries, led by the Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by ”la Caixa” Foundation, and conducted as part of  the "Ageing Lungs in European Cohorts" (ALEC) project*, coordinated by Imperial College London.

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  • Reprise of Worst Known Drought, Famine Possible — WSU Vancouver Researcher

    A Washington State University researcher has completed the most thorough analysis yet of The Great Drought — the most devastating known drought of the past 800 years — and how it led to the Global Famine, an unprecedented disaster that took 50 million lives.

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  • Nice People Finish Last When It Comes To Money

    Nice people may be at greater risk of bankruptcy and other financial hardships compared with their less agreeable peers, not because they are more cooperative, but because they don’t value money as much, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

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  • Why the Current Hurricane Rating System Needs to Be Scrapped

    Modern meteorological data collection gives us an unprecedented view into the real-time growth, track, and death of tropical cyclones. Recently, we watched as Hurricane Florence started as a tropical wave off the west coast of Africa, grew into a storm with Category 4 winds, and then made landfall on September 14 near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. At that point, with sustained winds down to 90 miles-per-hour, Florence was classified as merely a Category 1 storm. But after moving rapidly across the Atlantic, Hurricane Florence had slowed to a crawl before hitting the Carolina coast, turning the storm into a rain bomb that dropped more precipitation — 36 inches in one town — than all previous U.S. tropical cyclones save one, last year’s Hurricane Harvey. Fears of coastal flooding were rapidly replaced by the reality of prolonged, inland flooding.

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