Typhoon season has been particularly brutal this year, with 26 named storms battering East Asia. The storms are difficult to predict, especially months in advance when mitigation planning could be most useful, but large-scale weather patterns may offer clues. This year, many are pointing at the strong El Niño, a cyclical phenomenon of warming ocean surface temperatures, as the primary driver of the increased number and severity of the storms — but it might not be entirely El Niño’s fault and there may be better predictors, according to researchers at Zhejiang University.

Researchers leveraged the Centennial in situ Observation-Based SST Estimates version 3 (COBE-SST3) dataset to determine if marine cold spells (MCSs) were more intense following the volcanic winters resulting from six large-scale, climate-changing eruptions: Krakatau (1883), Santa Maria (1902), Novarupta (1912), Agung (1963), El Chichón (1982) and Pinatubo (1991).

Scintillators convert high energy radiation into detectable light, making them essential materials for radiation detection and X ray imaging. Yet some of the energy deposited by radiation is lost before it can be emitted as light. A study published in Research shows how restructuring the light emitting units in a metal halide can reduce these losses by confining electronic excitations more strongly.

A review maps how cancer-proven CAR-T therapy could shift medicine from treating individual diseases toward targeting the shared process of aging.

The fast electron beam pinching in nonuniform plasmas, where a density upramp acts as a plasma lens to violently self-focus the beam, offers a promising pathway toward ultra-bright gamma-ray sources with photon energies reaching up to the GeV scale.