Science, Spoken

In 2015, the U.S. Naval Academy decided that its graduates needed to return to the past and learn how to navigate using the stars. Nine years prior, it had dropped celestial navigation from its requirements because GPS was so accurate and simple to use. But recent events had shaken the academy’s faith in GPS. Researchers had taken over a yacht’s navigation system as it steered in the Mediterranean.

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One year ago, Hewlett Packard Enterprise sent an off-the-shelf supercomputer up to the International Space Station, to see if its mass-produced hardware could survive, basically unmodified, in the harsh environment of space. Now NASA and the computer company are declaring the experiment a success—even though nearly half of its hard disks failed after getting fried by solar radiation.

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If you ever meet a climate scientist, give them a hug. Not only is the work important, it involves an absolute mess of variables—emissions, maybe sequestering those emissions, atmospheric patterns, maybe geoengineering that atmosphere. Data is often sparse or non-existent. So give them a hug. The data problem is particularly acute in the oceans. A key part of figuring out how much the planet has warmed, and how drastically we need to cut emissions, is determining how the sea is changing.

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Last November, Apple Watch owners began receiving recruitment emails from Apple. The company was looking for owners of its smartwatch to participate in the Apple Heart Study—a Stanford-led investigation into the wearable's ability to sense irregular heart rhythms. Joining was simple: Install an app and wear your watch.

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It would be extraordinarily difficult—impossibly difficult—for any one of the several thousand asylum-seeking refugees in the so-called migrant caravan now on the border between Guatemala and Mexico to have smallpox. A global vaccination campaign eliminated the disease from the world at large in 1980. Yet that’s what a guest on the Fox Business Network show Lou Dobbs Tonight said earlier this week.

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Los Angeles derives much of its charm from its diversity, both of its people and its amenities—rolling hills here, lovely architecture there, a national forest to the north and legendary beaches to the west. But much of it is in trouble: Sea level rise is coming for Los Angeles County and its 74 miles of coast. According to a new report from the New York Academy of Sciences, it’ll take LA as much as $6.

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. New York is suing the oil giant ExxonMobil in a lawsuit that claims the company engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to downplay the risks posed to its business by climate change regulations.

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This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a dire report that made crystal clear that we have about a decade to stop catastrophic levels of climate change. The report caught fire for another extremely near deadline: It suggests that if we don’t manage to dramatically shift carbon emissions, we’ll start feeling the brunt of the effects as soon as 2040.

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On paper, carbon capture is a simple proposition: Take carbon that we’ve pulled out of the Earth in the form of coal and oil and put into the atmosphere, and pull it out of the atmosphere and put it back in the Earth. It’s like hitting undo on the Industrial Revolution. And scientists can indeed yank CO2 out of thin air, except that the process is expensive, not very efficient, and morally complicated.

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In November 2016, a team of scientists from the Medical Research Council in Gambia visited primary schools armed with hundreds of beige-colored nylon socks. Handing them out to children there aged five to 14, the researchers instructed them to wear the socks overnight, only taking them off if they were washing their feet for prayer.

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