In the middle of last year, Google announced that it was turning Android phones into an early earthquake alert system. The system was first deployed in California which already has a sophisticated network of seismometers in place. In California, the Android Earthquake Alerts System disseminated alerts from the existing ShakeAlert system, but in regions that don’t have seismometer networks, Google said that users could opt in to turn their Android phone into a mini seismometer. Today, Google has

These mysterious earthquakes originate between 400 and 700 kilometers below the surface of the Earth and have been recorded with magnitudes up to 8.3 on the Richter scale. Xanthippi Markenscoff, a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, is the person who solved this mystery. Her paper "Volume collapse instabilities in deep earthquakes: a shear source nucleated and driven by pressure" appears in the J

While the concept of “deepfakes,” or AI-generated synthetic imagery, has been decried primarily in connection with involuntary depictions of people, the technology is dangerous (and interesting) in other ways as well. For instance, researchers have shown that it can be used to manipulate satellite imagery to produce real-looking — but totally fake — overhead maps of cities. The study, led by Bo Zhao from the University of Washington, is not intended to alarm anyone but rather to show the ri

From space, large decks of closely spaced stratocumulus clouds appear like bright cotton balls hovering over the ocean. They cover vast areas—literally thousands of miles of the subtropical oceans—and linger for weeks to months. Because these marine clouds reflect more solar radiation than the surface of the ocean, cooling the Earth's surface, the lifetime of stratocumulus clouds is an important component of the Earth's radiation balance. It is necessary, then, to accurately represent cloud

The rate of sea-level rise in the 20th century along much of the U.S. Atlantic coast was the fastest in 2,000 years, and southern New Jersey had the fastest rates, according to a Rutgers-led study. The global rise in sea-level from melting ice and warming oceans from 1900 to 2000 led to a rate that's more than twice the average for the years 0 to 1800—the most significant change, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications. The study for the first time looked at the phe