My Octopus Teacher — a documentary about the smarts of cephalopods — inspired a team of engineers to create materials that can grab and release objects with rough and irregular surfaces. Those novel materials, which have many potential uses — from helping people with disabilities to better grab objects to creating robots to assist in underwater cleanup — are presented in an Advanced Science report.Michael Bartlett, the lead investigator in the study and engineering professor at Virginia ...read more
A series of underwater caves off the southern coast of Sicily holds clues about Ice Age-era human migration. A team of ‘citizen scientists’ — including a tugboat captain and both recreational and Italian navy divers — helped discover them.The findings, reported in PLOS ONE, describe 25 caves and rock shelters that show signs of human occupation from about 17,000 years ago. Many scholars consider Sicily to be among the first islands humans settled in the Mediterranean. In this case, the r ...read more
Hundreds of industrial facilities with toxic pollutants are in Hurricane Milton’s path as it heads toward Florida, less than two weeks after Hurricane Heleneflooded communities across the Southeast.Milton, expected to make landfall as a major hurricane late on Oct. 9, is bearing down on boat and spa factories along Florida’s west-central coast, along with the rubber, plastics, and fiberglass manufacturers that supply them. Many of these facilities use tens of thousands of registered contamin ...read more
Humanity’s impact on the climate is clear and devastating. Over the last two hundred years or so, we have pumped enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to significantly increase its temperature and raise the frightening prospect of much of the Earth becoming uninhabitable. The current plan to avoid this fate is to reduce net carbon emissions to zero within the next 20 years. That will surely help, provided Earth has not moved beyond any significant tipping points by then.But there is anothe ...read more
Of all the hazards that hurricanes bring, storm surge is the greatest threat to life and property along the coast. It can sweep homes off their foundations, flood riverside communities miles inland, and break up dunes and levees that normally protect coastal areas against storms.As a hurricane reaches the coast, it pushes a huge volume of ocean water ashore. This is what we call storm surge.This surge appears as a gradual rise in the water level as the storm approaches. Depending on the size and ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine