Why chaos prevents us from predicting the weather
Mashable’s series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives — and our futures. Will a storm probably hit my town? Will it be a terrible...
NASA’s impressive new AI can predict when a hurricane intensifies
Meteorologists have gotten pretty damn good at forecasting a hurricane’s track. But they still struggle to calculate when it will intensify, as it’s seriously hard to understand what’s happening inside...
Arctic Circle fires this year smashed a grim record
Superlatives can describe 2020's fires in the Arctic Circle. To illustrate, the 2020 fires trumped even 2019's Arctic blazes, which were already record-breaking, compared to the previous 16 years of...
Why it’s impossible to forecast the weather too far into the future
Why should there be a strict limit, however, on predicting a day’s weather? How can human progress and understanding — having eradicated smallpox, built supercomputers, and sent humanity to the...
New study suggests we all might be children of alien organisms
I want to ROCK (or not) One variation of the panspermia idea, lithopanspermia theory, suggests microbes may hide within the rocky confines of asteroids, protected from the often-damaging effects of radiation....
Hubble reveals Andromeda has made contact with our galaxy
Abner! Abner! Astronomers set the sights of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on 43 quasars (highly-active galaxies) set behind the galactic halo, viewing light traveling through several...
Thought experiment shows how we might be at the mercy of quantum jerks from another universe
Artificial intelligence researcher and US Air Force Captain Eric Halloway recently published a fun thought experiment showing how simple it would be to prove we live in one of multiple...
Why more heat will pummel California
Another blast of heat will sting California. The National Weather Service expects much of the fire-ravaged state will experience unusually hot early September temperatures over Labor Day weekend and beyond,...
Watch the first ever demo of a self-powered electronic paper interface
Scientists have developed a method of turning paper into keyboards that can convert notebooks into music players and make food packaging interactive. Engineers from Purdue University made the interfaces repellent...
Here’s your COVID-19 horoscope (since you hate science so much)
Coronavirus in Context is a weekly newsletter where we bring you facts that matter about the COVID-19 pandemic and the technology trying to stop its spread. You can subscribe here. Hola pandemic pals,...