By some measures, AI systems are now competitive with traditional computing methods for generating weather forecasts. Because their training penalizes errors, however, the forecasts tend to get "blurry"—as you move further ahead in time, the models make fewer specific predictions since those are more likely to be wrong. As a result, you start to see things like storm tracks broadening and the storms themselves losing clearly defined edges.

But using AI is still extremely tempting because the alternative is a computational atmospheric circulation model, which is extremely compute-intensive. Still, it's highly successful, with the ensemble model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts considered the best in class.

In a paper being released today, Google's DeepMind claims its new AI system manages to outperform the European model on forecasts out to at least a week and often beyond. DeepMind's system, called GenCast, merges some computational approaches used by atmospheric scientists with a diffusion model, commonly used in generative AI. The result is a system that maintains high resolution while cutting the computational cost significantly.

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In late September, seagrass ecologist Alyssa Novak pulled on her neoprene wetsuit, pressed her snorkel mask against her face, and jumped off an oyster farming boat into the shallow waters of Pleasant Bay, an estuary in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. Through her mask she gazed toward the sandy seabed, about 3 feet below the surface at low tide, where she was about to plant an experimental underwater garden of eelgrass.

Naturally occurring meadows of eelgrass—the most common type of seagrass found along the East Coast of the United States—are vanishing. Like seagrasses around the world, they have been plagued for decades by dredging, disease, and nutrient pollution from wastewater and agricultural runoff. The nutrient overloads have fueled algal blooms and clouded coastal waters with sediments, blocking out sunlight the marine plants need to make food through photosynthesis and suffocating them.

The United Nations Environment Program reports more than 20 of the world’s 72 seagrass species are on the decline. As a result, an estimated 7 percent of these habitats are lost each year.

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There's nothing quite like a deep dive into the shallow, vomitous puddles of children's splash pads. Even toeing the edge is enough to have one longing for the unsettling warmth of a kiddie pool. But the brave souls at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done it, wading into 25 years' worth of records on gastrointestinal outbreaks linked to the wellsprings of fecal pathogens. And they unsurprisingly found enough retch-inducing results to make any modern-day John Snows want to start removing some water handles.

Between 1997 and 2022, splash pads across the country were linked to at least 60 outbreaks, with the largest sickening over 2,000 water frolickers in one go. In all, the outbreaks led to at least 10,611 illnesses, 152 hospitalizations, and 99 emergency department visits. People, mostly children, were sickened with pathogens including Cryptosporidium, Camplyobacter jejuni, Giardia duodenalis, Salmonella, Shigella, and norovirus, according to the analysis, published Tuesday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The tallies of outbreaks and illnesses are likely undercounts, given reporting delays and missed connections.

Though previous outbreak-based studies have provided bursts of data, the new analysis is the first to provide a comprehensive catalog of all the documented outbreaks since splash pads erupted in the 1990s. Together, they provide a clear, stomach-churning explanation of how the outbreaks keep happening. Basically, small children go into the watery playgrounds while they're sick and spread their germs.

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On April 15, 2019, the world watched in transfixed horror as a fire ravaged the famed Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, collapsing the spire and melting the lead roof. After years of painstaking restoration costing around $740 million, the cathedral reopens to the public this weekend. The December issue of National Geographic features an exclusive look inside the restored cathedral, accompanied by striking photographs by Paris-based photographer and visual artist Tomas van Houtryve.

For several hours, it seemed as if the flames would utterly destroy the 800-year-old cathedral. But after a long night of work by more than 400 Paris firefighters, the fire finally began to cool and attention began to shift to what could be salvaged and rebuilt. French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to restore Notre Dame to its former glory and set a five-year deadline. The COVID-19 pandemic caused some delays, but France nearly met that deadline regardless.

Those reconstruction efforts were helped by the fact that, a few years before the fire, scientist Andrew Tallon had used laser scanning to create precisely detailed maps of the interior and exterior of the cathedral—an invaluable aid as Paris rebuilds this landmark structure. French acousticians had also made detailed measurements of Notre Dame's "soundscape" that were instrumental in helping architects factor acoustics into their reconstruction plans. The resulting model even enabled Brian FG Katz, research director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Sorbonne University, to create a virtual reality version of Notre Dame with all the acoustical parameters in place.

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There's a common popular science demonstration involving "soap boats," in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn't last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar "cocktail boats" can significantly extend the effect because the alcohol evaporates rather than saturating the water.

That simple classroom demonstration could also be used to propel tiny robotic devices across liquid surfaces to carry out various environmental or industrial tasks, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv. The authors also exploited the so-called "Cheerios effect" as a means of self-assembly to create clusters of tiny ethanol-powered robots.

As previously reported, those who love their Cheerios for breakfast are well acquainted with how those last few tasty little "O"s tend to clump together in the bowl: either drifting to the center or to the outer edges. The "Cheerios effect is found throughout nature, such as in grains of pollen (or, alternatively, mosquito eggs or beetles) floating on top of a pond; small coins floating in a bowl of water; or fire ants clumping together to form life-saving rafts during floods. A 2005 paper in the American Journal of Physics outlined the underlying physics, identifying the culprit as a combination of buoyancy, surface tension, and the so-called "meniscus effect."

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Bird flu has landed on a California farm that shuns virus-killing pasteurization, leading to a second recall of raw milk and a suspension of operations at the company, Raw Farm in Fresno County.

According to a November 27 alert by the California health department, officials in Santa Clara County found evidence of bird flu virus in retail samples of a batch of Raw Farm's milk, which has been recalled. It is the second time that retail testing has turned up positive results for the company and spurred a recall. The first contaminated batch was reported on November 24. The two recalled batches are those with lot codes 20241109 ("Best By" date of November 27, 2024) and 20241119 (Best By date of December 7, 2024).

In an email to Ars on Monday, Raw Farm CEO Mark McAfee said that none of the company's cows are visibly sick but that it appears that asymptomatic cows are shedding the avian influenza virus.

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Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100° Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers, and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.

Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation, and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.

Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts, and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields, and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.

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Some of the most bizarre lifeforms on Earth lurk in the deeper realms of the ocean. There was so little known about one of these creatures that it took 20 years just to figure out what exactly it was. Things only got weirder from there.

The organism’s distinctive, glowing presence was observed by multiple deep-sea missions between 2000 to 2021 but was simply referred to as “mystery mollusk.” A team of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researchers has now reviewed extensive footage of past mystery mollusk sightings and used MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to observe it and collect samples. They’ve given it a name and have finally confirmed that it is a nudibranch—the first and only nudibranch known to live at such depths.

Bathydevius caudactylus, as this nudibranch is now called, lives 1,000–4,000 meters (3,300–13,100 feet) deep in the ocean’s bathypelagic or midnight zone. It moves like a jellyfish, eats like a Venus flytrap, and is bioluminescent, and its genes are distinct enough for it to be classified as the first member of a new phylogenetic family.

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Rob Bauer, the chair of a NATO military committee, reportedly said, “It is more competent not to wait, but to hit launchers in Russia in case Russia attacks us. We must strike first.” These comments, supposedly made in 2024, were later interpreted as suggesting NATO should attempt a preemptive strike against Russia, an idea that lots of people found outrageously dangerous.

But lots of people also missed a thing about the quote: Bauer has never said it. It was made up. Despite that, the purported statement got nearly 250,000 views on X and was mindlessly spread further by the likes of Alex Jones.

Why do stories like this get so many views and shares? “The vast majority of misinformation studies assume people want to be accurate, but certain things distract them,” says William J. Brady, a researcher at Northwestern University. “Maybe it’s the social media environment. Maybe they’re not understanding the news, or the sources are confusing them. But what we found is that when content evokes outrage, people are consistently sharing it without even clicking into the article.” Brady co-authored a study on how misinformation exploits outrage to spread online. When we get outraged, the study suggests, we simply care way less if what’s got us outraged is even real.

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China's new Long March 12 rocket made a successful inaugural flight Saturday, placing two experimental satellites into orbit and testing uprated, higher-thrust engines that will allow a larger Chinese launcher in development to send astronauts to the Moon.

The 203-foot-tall (62-meter) Long March 12 rocket lifted off at 9:25 am EST (14:25 UTC) Saturday from the Wenchang commercial launch site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province. This was also the first rocket launch from a new commercial spaceport at Wenchang, consisting of two launch sites a short distance from a pair of existing launch pads used by heavier rockets primarily geared for government missions.

The two-stage rocket delivered two technology demonstration satellites into a near-circular 50-degree-inclination orbit with an average altitude of nearly 650 miles (about 1,040 kilometers), according to US military tracking data.

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SpaceX recently hit some notable milestones with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, and even in the full context of history, the performance of the vehicle is pretty incredible.

Last Tuesday, the company launched a batch of Starlink v2-mini satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket, marking the 400th successful mission by the Falcon 9 rocket. Additionally, it was the Falcon program's 375th booster recovery, according to SpaceX. Finally, with this mission, the company shattered its record for turnaround time from the landing of a booster to its launch to 13 days and 12 hours, down from 21 days.

But even though it was mere hours before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, SpaceX was not done for the month. On Saturday, November 30, the company launched twice more in a little more than three hours. The payloads were more Starlink Internet satellites in addition to two Starshield satellites—a custom version of Starlink for the US Department of Defense—for the US military.

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What happens when a gargantuan cloud of gas swallows a pair of monster black holes with their own appetites? Feasting on the gas can cause some weird (heavenly) bodily functions.

AT 2021hdr is a binary supermassive black hole (BSMBH) system in the center of a galaxy 1 billion light-years away, in the Cygnus constellation. In 2021, researchers observing it using NASA’s Zwicky Transient Facility saw strange outbursts that were flagged by the ALerCE (Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events) team.

This active galactic nucleus (AGN) flared so brightly that AT 2021hdr was almost mistaken for a supernova. Repeating flares soon ruled that out. When the researchers questioned whether they might be looking at a tidal disruption event—a star being torn to shreds by the black holes—something was still not making sense. They then compared observations they made in 2022 using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to simulations of something else they suspected: a tidal disruption of a gas cloud by binary supermassive black holes. It seemed they had found the most likely answer.

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If you aren’t yet worried about the multitude of ways you inadvertently inflict suffering onto other living creatures, you will be after reading The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch. And for good reason. Birch, a Professor of Philosophy at the London College of Economics and Political Science, was one of a team of experts chosen by the UK government to establish the Animal Welfare Act (or Sentience Act) in 2022—a law that protects animals whose sentience status is unclear.

According to Birch, even insects may possess sentience, which he defines as the capacity to have valenced experiences, or experiences that feel good or bad. At the very least, Birch explains, insects (as well as all vertebrates and a selection of invertebrates) are sentience candidates: animals that may be conscious and, until proven otherwise, should be regarded as such.

Although it might be a stretch to wrap our mammalian minds around insect sentience, it is not difficult to imagine that fellow vertebrates have the capacity to experience life, nor does it come as a surprise that even some invertebrates, such as octopuses and other cephalopod mollusks (squid, cuttlefish, and nautilus) qualify for sentience candidature. In fact, one species of octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has been protected by the UK’s Animal Scientific Procedures Act (ASPA) since 1986, which illustrates how long we have been aware of the possibility that invertebrates might be capable of experiencing valenced states of awareness, such as contentment, fear, pleasure, and pain.

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Welcome to Edition 7.21 of the Rocket Report! We're publishing the Rocket Report a little early this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We don't expect any Thanksgiving rocket launches this year, but still, there's a lot to cover from the last six days. It seems like we've seen the last flight of the year by SpaceX's Starship rocket. A NASA filing with the Federal Aviation Administration requests approval to fly an aircraft near the reentry corridor over the Indian Ocean for the next Starship test flight. The application suggests the target launch date is January 11, 2025.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Another grim first in Ukraine. For the first time in warfare, Russia launched an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile against a target in Ukraine, Ars reports. This attack on November 21 followed an announcement from Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier the same week that the country would change its policy for employing nuclear weapons in conflict. The IRBM, named Oreshnik, is the longest-range weapon ever used in combat in Europe and could be refitted to carry nuclear warheads on future strikes.

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If Margaritaville were a real place, it should definitely keep a few dermatologists on hand.

In a case of an oft-overlooked food preparation risk, a 40-year-old man showed up to an allergy clinic in Texas with a severe burning rash on both his hands that had developed two days earlier. A couple of days later, it blistered. And a few weeks after that, the skin darkened and scaled. After several months, the skin on his hands finally returned to normal.

The culprit: lime juice and sunlight.

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Paleontologists have long puzzled over how the dinosaurs—originally relatively small and of minor importance to the broader ecosystem—evolved to become the dominant species some 30 million years later. Fossilized feces and vomit from dinosaurs might hold important clues to how and why this evolutionary milestone came about, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Co-author Martin Qvarnström, an evolutionary biologist with Uppsala University in Sweden, and his collaborators studied trace fossils known as bromalites, a designation that includes coprolites as well as vomit or other fossilized matter from an organism's digestive tract. As previously reported, coprolites aren't quite the same as paleofeces, which retain a lot of organic components that can be reconstituted and analyzed for chemical properties. Coprolites are fossils, so most organic components have been replaced by mineral deposits like silicate and calcium carbonates.

For archaeologists keen on learning more about the health and diet of past populations—as well as how certain parasites evolved in the evolutionary history of the microbiome—coprolites and paleofeces can be a veritable goldmine of information. For instance, in 2021 we reported on an analysis of preserved paleo-poop revealing that ancient Iron Age miners in what is now Austria were fond of beer and blue cheese.

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Most airplanes in the world have vertical tails or rudders to prevent Dutch roll instabilities, a combination of yawing and sideways motions with rolling that looks a bit like the movements of a skater. Unfortunately, a vertical tail adds weight and generates drag, which reduces fuel efficiency in passenger airliners. It also increases the radar signature, which is something you want to keep as low as possible in a military aircraft.

In the B-2 stealth bomber, one of the very few rudderless airplanes, Dutch roll instabilities are dealt with using drag flaps positioned at the tips of its wings, which can split and open to make one wing generate more drag than the other and thus laterally stabilize the machine. “But it is not really an efficient way to solve this problem,” says David Lentink, an aerospace engineer and a biologist at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. “The efficient way is solving it by generating lift instead of drag. This is something birds do.”

Lentink led the study aimed at better understanding birds’ rudderless flight mechanics.

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Virtual reality (VR) technology has long sought to incorporate the human senses into virtual and mixed-reality environments. In addition to sight and sound, researchers have been trying to add the sensation of human touch and smell via various user interfaces, as well as taste. But the latter has proved to be quite challenging. A team of Hong Kong scientists has now developed a handheld user interface shaped like a lollipop capable of re-creating several different flavors in a virtual environment, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

It's well established that human taste consists of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—five basic flavors induced by chemical stimulation of the tongue and, to a lesser extent, in parts of the pharynx, larynx, and epiglottis. Recreating those sensations in VR has resulted in a handful of attempts at a flavor user interface, relying on such mechanisms as chemical, thermal, and electrical stimulation, as well as iontophoresis.

The chemical approach usually involves applying flavoring chemicals directly onto the tongue, but this requires room for bulk storage of said chemicals, and there is a long delay time that is not ideal for VR applications. Thermal variations applied directly to the tongue can stimulate taste sensations but require a complicated system incorporating a cooling subsystem and temperature sensors, among other components.

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When you compare SpaceX to the world's other space enterprises, it's probably easier to list the things SpaceX hasn't done instead of reciting all of the company's achievements.

One of these is the launch of nuclear materials. SpaceX has launched a handful of planetary science missions for NASA, but these spacecraft have all used solar arrays to generate electricity. In this century, NASA's probes relying on nuclear power have all flown on rockets built by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

This is about to change with a $256.6 million contract NASA awarded to SpaceX on Monday. The contract covers launch services and related costs for SpaceX to launch Dragonfly, a rotorcraft designed to explore the alien environment of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

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