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Severe weather model predicted tornado's path hours before it formed
As severe weather brewed in the Texas panhandle late in the afternoon of May 16, NOAA’s National Weather Service forecasters alerted residents in parts of western Oklahoma about the potential for large hail and damaging tornadoes that evening, particularly in the area around Elk City.Ninety minutes later, a dangerous, rain-wrapped EF2 tornado struck the small town. It killed…
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CEO Says Mexico Oil Find Is 'Multiples Of What We Thought'
It’s been a few years of soul-searching for Tim Duncan, the CEO of Talos Energy. The Houston-based oil company has long specialized in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana and Texas. Yet the oil bust that began in 2014 has made the region deeply unpopular. Facing dwindling prospects for big new…
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Scientists Design Solar Cell That Captures Nearly All Solar Spectrum Energy
A SEAS researcher helped develop technology that could become the most efficient solar cell in the world.
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Study: Calcium Levels Could Be Key to Contracting — and Stopping — C. Diff
It lurks in hospitals and nursing homes, surviving cleaning crews’ attempts to kill it by holing up in a tiny, hard shell. It preys upon patients already weak from disease or advanced age.
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NASA Infrared Image Shows Eugene Now a Remnant
Former Hurricane Eugene has now weakened to a remnant low pressure area. Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite revealed that only a small area of convection remains.
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How selenium compounds might become catalysts
Chemists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have tested a new approach for activating chemical reactions based on the element selenium. They demonstrated that selenium can form bonds similar to those of hydrogen bonds, resulting in accelerated reactions. The exact mechanism is described by the team at the Chair of Organic Chemistry 1 in Bochum, including Prof Dr…
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Testing a soft artificial heart
It looks like a real heart. And this is the goal of the first entirely soft artificial heart: to mimic its natural model as closely as possible. The silicone heart has been developed by Nicholas Cohrs, a doctoral student in the group led by Wendelin Stark, Professor of Functional Materials Engineering at ETH Zurich. The…
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Summer of sailing drones
Over the next four months, NOAA scientists will launch unmanned ocean vehicles, called Saildrones, from the Arctic to the tropical Pacific Ocean to help better understand how changes in the ocean are affecting weather, climate, fisheries and marine mammals. The wind and solar-powered research vehicles that resemble a sailboat will travel thousands of miles across…
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NOAA's greenhouse gas index up 40 percent since 1990
NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index, which tracks the warming influence of long-lived greenhouse gases, has increased by 40 percent from 1990 to 2016 — with most of that attributable to rising carbon dioxide levels, according to NOAA climate scientists.The role of greenhouse gases on influencing global temperatures is well understood by scientists, but it’s a…
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How Drones are Advancing Scientific Research
Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been around since the early 1900s. Originally used for military operations, they became more widely used after about 2010 when electronic technology got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, prices on cameras and sensors dropped, and battery power improved. Where once scientists could only observe earth from above by…