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Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Jeffrey Marlow writes: Somewhere beneath the Adriatic Sea, a rogue block of the African tectonic plate is burrowing under southern Europe, stretching Italy eastward by a few millimetres each year. On October 26, 2016, the stress triggered an earthquake in the Apennine Mountains, one in a series of quakes which toppled buildings in Italian towns. On the day of the tremor, Giuseppe Marra, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, was running an experiment that…

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Dark energy may come from giant cosmic voids

Dark energy may come from giant cosmic voids

Paul Sutter writes: Gigantic deserts of almost complete nothingness that make up most of the universe may be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, new research suggests. That means these vast tracts of nothingness could explain dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be flinging the universe apart. Zoom all the way out from the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, and an interesting pattern emerges: the cosmic web, the largest pattern found in nature….

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Trump’s storage of classified documents renews questions about transfer of nuclear technology to Saudis

Trump’s storage of classified documents renews questions about transfer of nuclear technology to Saudis

Politico reports: A search warrant newly unsealed on Friday reveals that the FBI is investigating Donald Trump for a potential violation of the Espionage Act and removed classified documents from the former president’s Florida estate earlier this week. A receipt accompanying the search warrant, viewed by POLITICO in advance of its unsealing, shows that Trump possessed documents including a handwritten note; documents marked with “TS/SCI,” which indicates one of the highest levels of government classification; and another item labeled “Info…

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Situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant ‘very alarming,’ says nuclear watchdog

Situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant ‘very alarming,’ says nuclear watchdog

Politico reports: The situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has deteriorated rapidly to the point of becoming “very alarming,” the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned at a U.N. Security Council meeting in New York late Thursday. “These military actions near such a large nuclear facility could lead to very serious consequences,” said IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi. The plant was shelled on August 5, causing several explosions near the electrical switchboard and a power…

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FBI attacker was prolific contributor to Trump’s Truth Social website

FBI attacker was prolific contributor to Trump’s Truth Social website

The Washington Post reports: In the minutes after an armed man in body armor tried to breach an FBI field office in Cincinnati, an account with the suspect’s name, Ricky Shiffer, posted to former president Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social: “If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I.” The Shiffer account appeared to be one of Truth Social’s most prolific posters, writing 374 messages there in the past eight days — mostly to…

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Arctic warming is happening faster than previously described, analysis shows

Arctic warming is happening faster than previously described, analysis shows

The New York Times reports: The rapid warming of the Arctic, a definitive sign of climate change, is occurring even faster than previously described, researchers in Finland said Thursday. Over the past four decades the region has been heating up four times faster than the global average, not the two to three times that has commonly been reported. And some parts of the region, notably the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia, are warming up to seven times faster,…

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Democrats finally jettison carbon pricing in favor of tax incentives to counter climate change

Democrats finally jettison carbon pricing in favor of tax incentives to counter climate change

Inside Climate News reports: The nation’s first comprehensive climate law, expected to be sealed with a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday, will not look anything like the program imagined by either climate economists or those in Washington and the environmental movement who had faith in bipartisan action. From the time that the world first agreed to act on climate change 30 years ago at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, environmentalists talked about putting a…

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The fervent debate over the best way to confront climate change

The fervent debate over the best way to confront climate change

By Madeline Ostrander, August 12, 2022 In the late 1950s, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies — which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains — worked well for holding back intermediate amounts of water. But they gave people a false sense of safety. After a levee went up, sometimes more people actually built and moved…

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No music training? No problem: Even novices intuit complex music theory

No music training? No problem: Even novices intuit complex music theory

Science reports: Your co-worker’s annoying humming may be more virtuosic than you think. People without musical training naturally improvise melodies that have hallmarks of tunes composed by professionals, a new study shows. It seems that most individuals follow the arcane rules of music composition, even those who are unaware those rules exist. “It’s cool,” says Samuel Mehr, an expert on the psychology of music at Yale University who was not involved in the work. The study offers an “elegant” way…

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How the Trump-FBI feud puts swing-state Republicans in a bind

How the Trump-FBI feud puts swing-state Republicans in a bind

Politico reports: As news broke that the FBI had searched Donald Trump’s Florida home, MAGA loyalists and even some of the former president’s potential 2024 rivals rushed to a full-throated defense of the former president. But not every Republican joined the chorus. While the FBI search has given a jolt of energy to the conservative base, the issue is proving to be more complicated in pivotal battleground races that could determine control of the chamber — places where Republicans had…

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Trump’s new lawyer views his new client as a ‘racist’

Trump’s new lawyer views his new client as a ‘racist’

The New York Times reports: Amid a deepening swirl of federal and state investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has hired a high-powered Atlanta lawyer to represent him in an inquiry into election interference in Georgia. The lawyer, Drew Findling, has represented an array of rap stars including Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos, and is known by the hashtag #BillionDollarLawyer. But he has not been a fan of Mr. Trump; in one 2018 post on Twitter, after Mr. Trump…

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With feds circling, Trump asks allies: Who’s ‘wearing a wire’?

With feds circling, Trump asks allies: Who’s ‘wearing a wire’?

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump is worried he may have a rat — or multiple rats — in his midst. He’s wondering if his phones are tapped, or even if one of his buddies could be “wearing a wire.” As the federal and state investigations into Trump and his orbit swell, so have the former president’s suspicions, according to two sources familiar with the matter and another two people close to the twice-impeached former Oval Office occupant. This summer, Trump…

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Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Insider reports: President Joe Biden privately met with a group of historians at the White House last week who warned him about ongoing threats to democracy, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Sources familiar with the August 4 meeting, which was said to have lasted nearly two hours, told the outlet the experts described the current moment as among the most dangerous to democracy in modern history. The people in the meeting were said to have included the Princeton University history…

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Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Sophie Fullerton writes: Last November, around the same time the Irish travel vlogger Janet Newenham was filming videos of her strolls through Damascus and Aleppo, five members of a family, including three children, were killed in a Russian airstrike in northwest Syria. But none of Newenham’s 170,000 YouTube subscribers would have learned that from her upbeat dispatches — in her videos, Syria is not a country at war. After a scorched-earth war — supported by Iranian forces, sectarian militias and…

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