Before tropical cyclones can significantly strengthen, they generally must first become vertically aligned, with their rotating centers stacked through the atmosphere. New research using nearly three decades of NOAA Hurricane Hunter observations identifies four features that can help a tilted storm become aligned and more capable of intensifying.

A new Perspective in Science Bulletin argues that the persistent gap between climate science and climate action stems from a conceptual blind spot: treating climate and social systems as separate domains rather than as one integrated, co-evolving entity. The authors introduce the Climate-Social Coupling System (CSS) paradigm and, by re-contextualizing the classic Environmental Kuznets Curve, sort national trajectories into “strong,” “weak,” and “de-coupling” states, showing that governance is the decisive, reversible steering mechanism that determines a country’s climate future.

For five days in April of 2025, record-breaking winds swept through China, with speeds surpassing 45 meters per second in some areas. That’s roughly the same wind speed of a category 2 hurricane. However, a hurricane breezes through in a matter of hours. What caused this extreme wind event — that resulted in five deaths and caused more than $154 million in economic losses, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management — to persist at such strength for so long and across so much of the country?

Researchers say a spike in temperatures during an ice age 304 million years ago could inform what climate scientists are learning about rapidly changing conditions today.

Joint press release from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany

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 Applied to a single rhodolith from the central Red Sea: The method reconstructed 133 days of temperature closely matching on-site measurements.

Preserved in the skeleton: The ratio of chemical elements in the growth layers reveals daily seawater temperatures

New method solves previous analysis problem: Growth measurements, 3D X-ray imaging, and data alignment merge the data from multiple algal branches into a single, continuous timeline.