Air pollution is dramatically reshaping tropical rainfall patterns. In a new study, scientists found that increasing aerosol concentrations over the Maritime Continent strengthens oceanic rainfall while suppressing and delaying land rain peaks to midnight. This newly identified shift, revealed through high-resolution modeling and satellite data, has major implications for forecasting and climate prediction in Southeast Asia.

Conventionally, deep neural networks (DNNs), including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are trained using backpropagation—a standard algorithm in AI learning. However, backpropagation suffers from several limitations, such as high computational cost and overfitting. Researchers have now developed a new training approach called the Visual Forward–Forward Network (VFF-Net), which overcomes these challenges. By eliminating the need for backpropagation, VFF-Net enables more efficient, less resource-intensive training while maintaining high accuracy and robustness.

New research has found cover crops that are viable in Washington’s normal “off season” don’t hurt the soil and can be sold as a biofuel source. 

After harvest, farmland often sits fallow and unused until growers seed in the next crop. Soil can erode, weeds can take root, and farmers don’t make any money during that time. Cover crops can eliminate or reduce some of those issues, but many farmers have concerns about their effects on soil quality, a reduced growing window for their primary crop, and the inability to sell the cover crop. 

In a paper recently published in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy, a team led by Washington State University scientists looked at four cover crops grown for multiple years in western and central Washington fields. Two showed promising results.

Griffith researchers built and tested a digital archaeology framework to learn more about the ancient humans who created one of the oldest forms of rock art, finger fluting.

Finger flutings are marks drawn by fingers through a soft mineral film called moonmilk on cave walls.

Experiments were conducted - both with adult participants in a tactile setup and using VR headsets in a custom-built program - to explore whether image-recognition methods could learn enough from finger-fluting images made by modern people to identify the sex of the person who created them.

A time crystal, a long-life quantum system approaching perpetual motion, has been hooked up to its environment for the first time, unlocking an intriguing way to increase quantum computational and sensing power.

A new study published in the journal Nature Communications reveals that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a key driver of global climate variability, is projected to undergo a dramatic transformation due to greenhouse warming. Using high-resolution climate models (Figure 1), a team of researchers from South Korea, the USA, Germany, and Ireland found that ENSO could intensify rapidly over the coming decades and synchronize with other major climate phenomena, reshaping global temperature and rainfall patterns by the end of the 21^st century.