RIO DE JANEIRO — After decades of delay and pressure, Brazil announced Tuesday that it will henceforth use “favelas and urban communities” to categorize thousands of poor, urban neighborhoods, instead of the previous term “subnormal agglomerates” that was widely viewed as stigmatizing. Starting in the 1990s, the national statistics and geography institute, known by its … Read more
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu officially requested India to withdraw its military personnel from the archipelago on Saturday, a day after being sworn in. The president’s office said in a statement that Muizzu made the request when he met Kiren Rijiju, India’s minister for earth sciences. He was in the Maldives for … Read more
In September, researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall—eons in forecasting terms—and official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. DeepMind’s own experimental software had … Read more
A series of powerful and shallow earthquakes have shaken a sparsely populated island chain in eastern Indonesia ByThe Associated Press November 8, 2023, 2:29 AM JAKARTA, Indonesia — A series of powerful and shallow earthquakes shook a sparsely populated island chain in eastern Indonesia on Wednesday. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties. … Read more
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Climate change would be much worse if it weren’t for the oceans, which have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat humanity has pumped into the atmosphere. That warming of the oceans has already been devastating for the organisms that live there, but it’s also come back to bite us in a more unexpected way: … Read more
Naaman and his team discovered that chiral molecules filter electrons based on the direction of their spin. Electrons with one spin orientation will move more efficiently across a chiral molecule in one direction than the other. Electrons with the opposite spin move more freely the other way. To understand why, imagine throwing a Frisbee that … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent most of the planet’s microbial … Read more