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    What to know about the extreme U.S. flooding — and ways to stay safe

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    July has washed across the United States with unusually destructive, deadly torrents of rain.

    In the first half of the month alone, historically heavy downpours sent rivers in Central Texas spilling far beyond their banks, causing at least 130 deaths. Rains prompted flash flooding across wildfire-scarred landscapes in New Mexico and flooded subway stations in New York City. Roadways in New Jersey turned into rivers, sweeping two people to their deaths as the floodwaters carried away their car. A tropical depression dumped up to 30 centimeters of rain in one day on parts of North Carolina, leading to at least six more deaths. More

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      Trees can’t get up and walk away, but forests can

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      An army of treelike creatures called Ents marches to war in the second The Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers, walking for miles through dark forests. Once they arrive at the fortress of the evil wizard Saruman, the Ents hurl giant boulders, climb over walls and even rip open a dam to wipe out their enemy.

      Mobile trees like the Ents are found throughout science fiction and fantasy worlds. The treelike alien Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy uses twiggy wings to fly. Trees called Evermean fight the main character Link in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom video game. And Harry Potter’s Whomping Willow — well, it whomps anyone who gets too close. More

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      Deep-sea mining could start soon — before we understand its risks

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      An underwater gold rush may be on the horizon — or rather, a rush to mine the seafloor for manganese, nickel, cobalt and other minerals used in electric vehicles, solar panels and more.

      Meanwhile, scientists and conservationists hope to pump the brakes on the prospect of deep-sea mining, warning that it may scar the seafloor for decades — and that there’s still far too little known about the lingering harm it might do to the deep ocean’s fragile ecosystems. More

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      Climate change could separate vanilla plants and their pollinators

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      Vanilla plants could have a future that’s not so sweet.

      Wild relatives of the vanilla plant — which could be essential if the original cash crop disappears — may someday live in different places than their usual pollinators, according to two climate change predictions. The result could be a major mismatch, with habitat overlap between one vanilla species and its pollinator decreasing by up to 90 percent, researchers report July 3 in Frontiers in Plant Science. More

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      Harmful heat doesn’t always come in waves

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      In recent weeks, extreme heat waves have broiled the United States, China and Europe. But scientists are warning of another hazardous form of heat: chronic heat. In places like Miami and Phoenix, temperatures can soar for months at a time without reaching heat wave levels, potentially contributing to health issues such as kidney disfunction, sleep apnea and depression. But too little research has focused on how these impacts may compound over months of exposure, University of Miami climate and health researcher Mayra Cruz and colleagues report in the June Environmental Research Climate.

      “It’s the family that lives with conditions that are just a little bit too hot all the time and no air conditioning,” says Victoria Turner, an urban planner at UCLA who was not involved in the study. “The mother is pregnant in hot conditions, their children go to bed without air conditioning and go to schools without air conditioning, and then that’s changing their developmental physiology.” More

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      U.S. seal populations have rebounded — and so have their conflicts with humans

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      Aaron Tremper is the editorial assistant for Science News Explores. He has a B.A. in English (with minors in creative writing and film production) from SUNY New Paltz and an M.A. in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Science and Health Reporting program. A former intern at Audubon magazine and Atlanta’s NPR station, WABE 90.1 FM, he has reported a wide range of science stories for radio, print, and digital media. His favorite reporting adventure? Tagging along with researchers studying bottlenose dolphins off of New York City and Long Island, NY. More

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      Is nuclear energy good? A new book explores this complex question

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      Atomic DreamsRebecca Tuhus-DubrowAlgonquin Books, $30

      Toxic sludge. A glowing radioactive rat. A three-eyed fish named “Blinky.” These are scenes from a 1990 episode of the long-running television show The Simpsons, in which protagonist and oaf Homer is a safety inspector at the fictional Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. The imagined horrors of the plant reflect concerns many real people have had about nuclear energy over the course of its young history, which began with the first sustained nuclear reaction in 1942. That includes the Simpson-esque concern of a corporate plant owner who prioritizes profit over safety. More

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      This paint ‘sweats’ to keep your house cool

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      A cool house without air conditioning may soon be possible.

      Scientists in Singapore have developed a new type of paint that reflects sunlight and cools surfaces by slowly evaporating water. Unlike other commercially available cooling paints, which are designed to repel water to protect the underlying material, the new one even works in hot, humid places, offering a low-energy way to stay cool, researchers report June 5 in Science.

      “The key is passive cooling,” which requires no energy input, says material scientist Li Hong In other words, it works without using electricity or mechanical systems. Right now, radiative cooling is the most common type of passive cooling used in materials, including certain paints. It works by reflecting sunlight and radiating heat from a surface such as walls or roofs, into the sky. But in humid places like Singapore, water vapor in the air traps heat near the surface, which prevents it from escaping into the atmosphere and keeps the surfaces warm.In response, Hong and two other material scientists from Nanyang Technological University developed a cement-based paint that combines three cooling strategies: radiative cooling, evaporative cooling, which our skin uses, and solar reflection. In the study, the scientists painted three small houses: one with regular white paint, one with commercial cooling paint that uses only radiative cooling and one with their new formula. After two years of sun and rain in Singapore, the first two paints had turned yellow. But “our paint was still white,” says coauthor Jipeng Fei. Unlike other colors, white helps materials maintain their high reflectivity and cooling performance. More

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      Climate change is coming for your cheese

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      By affecting cows’ diets, climate change can affect cheese’s nutritional value and sensory traits such as taste, color and texture. This is true at least for Cantal — a firm, unpasteurized cheese from the Auvergne region in central France, researchers report February 20 in the Journal of Dairy Science.

      Cows in this region typically graze on local grass. But as climate change causes more severe droughts, some dairy producers are shifting to other feedstocks for their cows, such as corn, to adapt. “Farmers are looking for feed with better yields than grass or that are more resilient to droughts,” but they also want to know how dietary changes affect their products, says animal scientist Matthieu Bouchon.

      For almost five months in 2021, Bouchon and colleagues at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment tested 40 dairy cows from two different breeds — simulating a drought and supplementing grass with other fodder, largely corn, in varying amounts.

      The research team tested climate-adapted diets on cows, like the one seen here, at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment.INRAE/Matthieu Bouchon

      The team sampled milk from all cows at regular intervals. Milk’s fatty acid and protein profiles impact cheese formation, melting qualities and nutrition, so the researchers chemically identified distributions of those molecules with a technique called gas chromatography. They also identified beneficial microbes in the milk by making Petri dish cultures.

      They found that a corn-based diet did not affect milk yield and even led to an estimated reduction in the greenhouse gas methane coming from cows’ belching. But grass-fed cows’ cheese was richer and more savory than that from cows mostly or exclusively fed corn. Grass-based diets also yielded cheese with more heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids and higher counts of probiotic lactic acid bacteria. The authors suggest that to maintain cheese quality, producers should include fresh vegetation in cows’ fodder when it is based on corn. More