Summers will be hotter and drier and winters will be much stormier and wetter in the coming years, climate researchers have warned.

It is all part of a "new normal" brought to us by global warming.


Gone is the notion of a "hundred-year storm" or "20-year rainfall". The coming decades in Ireland will be marked by extreme seasonal conditions, say researchers at Maynooth University.

It means weather records will be set and reset as the new normal brings these exceptional conditions.

The team studied 150 years of Irish weather data, picking out examples of the wettest, stormiest, driest and hottest of years and defined the likelihood of these extreme events happening again.

Using climate models they then projected forward 100 years to see how often extremes might occur when in lock-step with overall climate change.

The results published in the journal Climate Risk Management make for shocking reading.

On March 21st, Comet 252P/LINEAR will make a close approach to Earth--only 0.036 AU (5.4 million km) away. This is the fifth closest cometary approach on record and, as a result, the normally dim comet could become an easy target for backyard telescopes. In fact, it is brightening much faster than expected: data. "Comet 252P/LINEAR has surpassed expectations and is now bordering on naked eye visibility for southern observers," reports Michael Mattiazzo of Swan Hill, Victoria, Australia, who took this picture on March 13th:
"Since March 7th, the comet has brightened about 0.5 magnitudes per day," continues Mattiazzo, "and now it is near 6th magnitude. The comet's atmosphere (coma) is expanding rapidly, too, from 10 arcminutes on March 7th to 35 arcminutes on March 14th. It may reach 1^o across by March 21st."

This is a southern hemisphere event. At closest approach on March 21st, the brightening comet will speed through the constellations Triangulum Australis and Apus. Observers south of the equator can use this ephemeris to point their telescopes. In remote places with very dark skies, it is possible that no telescope will be required; naked eyes might suffice. Stay tuned for updates as the comet approaches.

Thanks to a painstaking process, researchers have identified the oldest human DNA ever found.

According to a study published in the journal Nature, the DNA was actually from a pre-Neanderthal lineage that lived about 400,000 years ago.

The DNA was extracted from bones discovered in a cave in northern Spain known as the "Pit of Bones".

In making their discovery, the study team was only able to decode just 0.1 percent of the ancient genome. The specimens were severely degraded and contaminated and that meant researchers scrapped enough raw data to sequence our genome dozens of times over.

Despite the lack of genetic data, research found enough to reveal some evolutionary traits.

Using skeletal evidence, past research efforts had concluded the 28 people buried in the 42-foot-deep cave shaft belonged to a human species know as Homo heidelbergensis, a precursor to the classic Neanderthal.

The technique may be so efficient that it will cause whole areas to be "fished out"

Conservationists are increasingly concerned about a radical new method of sea fishing being employed off the British coast, using electric shocks, which has been described as "the marine equivalent of fracking".

Pulse fishing is claimed by its supporters to be the answer to many of the problems caused by traditional fishing with beam trawls in the same way as fracking, the hydraulic fracturing of underground shale rock formations to release the gas they contain, is said by its proponents to be the answer to our energy problems. Yet, just as fracking has triggered controversy about its side effects, the new fishing technique - which uses powerful pulses of electricity fired from towed electrodes into the seabed - has raised serious worries about its impact, especially as it has not been scientifically evaluated for damaging environmental effects, even though it is now going ahead on a large scale.

Pulse fishing's electric shocks force commercially valuable bottom-dwelling fish and seafood such as sole and shrimps up from the seabed into the water column, and allows them to be easily caught in a trawl net. It has been taken up with enthusiasm by Dutch fishermen who fish in the southern North Sea and the English Channel, and has enabled them to increase greatly their catches of sole - their main target species.

A man who had his lower arm amputated has regained a realistic sense of texture using a bionic finger surgically connected to his nerves

"I could tell the difference between rough and smooth - it was amazing," says Dennis Sørensen.

People who have had their hand or arm amputated can use a prosthetic body part to help them lift or grip objects. A device that could also recreate their sense of touch would make it easier for them to identify and manipulate objects.

To replicate this sense, Silvestro Micera and his team at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland developed a bionic finger containing electromechanical sensors that deform when touched.

The sensors send an electrical signal to a computer. This converts the signal into a sequence of on-off commands, stimulating nerves via electrodes surgically inserted into the upper arm. The patterns of stimulation closely emulate those that naturally occur when you run your finger across different textures.

From baby talk to walruses, how sound legend Ben Burtt made some of the most recognizable cinematic sound effects in the world ​
When George Lucas began work on Star Wars in the mid-1970s, he tapped a USC classmate to craft all the strange sounds for this risky sci-fi movie about a sheltered kid on a distant planet who ends up saving the galaxy. That man was Ben Burtt, who spent about a year coming up with different ideas for, say, how a Wookie talks or the exact combination of human and electronic sounds needed to bring a droid to life.

As Burtt later told an interviewer, "Since we were going to design a visual world that had rust and dents and dirt, we wanted a sound world that had squeaks and motors that may not be smooth-sounding or quiet. Putting in sounds from the real world creates the illusion that these fantasies are credible."

Almost 40 years after its premiere, Star Wars is such a cultural colossus that even its sound effects are ingrained in our subconscious. For that, you can thank Burtt, who has won two competitive Oscars and two special-achievement Oscars, and has gone on to work on such projects as E.T., the Indiana Jones films and Wall-E. Once asked what makes a good sound designer, Burtt responded, "It boils down to the ability to select or create the right sound for the right moment, to pick the thing that dramatically tells what needs to be said in that moment." As these six examples demonstrate below, Burtt's sonic instincts are pitch-perfect.

Blasters

The quick, short firing sound of the blasters used by the Rebellion and the Empire stands in marked contrast to the slow, elegant hum of the other major weapon in the Star Wars universe, the lightsaber. Ben Burtt stumbled upon the precise sound by accident while on a family vacation.

The human microbiome, a diverse collection of microorganisms living inside us and on our skin, has attracted considerable attention for its role in a broad range of human health issues. Now, researchers are discovering that the built environment also has a microbiome, which includes a community of potentially-pathogenic bacteria living inside water supply pipes.

A paper published March 11 in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology describes microbial communities found in shower hoses at a major U.S. hospital. The study documented bacteria - and related genes - using cutting-edge metagenomic techniques that allow the characterization of organisms that cannot be detected using traditional culture-based microbiology assays.

Researchers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Georgia Institute of Technology collaborated to study these biofilm communities, but can't say yet if these bacteria pose a threat to hospital patients. But because some of the genes could indicate pathogenic characteristics - such as resistance to antibiotics - the researchers want to learn more about the potential health implications, and whether other buildings house similar biofilms. Antibiotic resistance is a public health emerging priority identified by the World Health Organization, which in 2015 released a global action plan to address the problem.

Until very recently, one of the biggest myths in science was that all dinosaurs have been extinct for the past 65 million years. But thanks to new fossil discoveries that filled in our knowledge about avian dinosaurs, we now know that only some dinosaurs went extinct following an asteroid collision with Earth - others survived and gave rise to the birds we live with today.

To figure out how this evolution occurred, researchers in Chile have manipulated the genes of regular chickens so they develop tubular, dinosaur-like fibulas on their lower legs - one of the two long, spine-like bones you'll find in a drumstick.

In avian dinosaurs such as the Archaeopteryx, the fibula was a tube-shaped bone that reached all the way down to the ankle. Another bone, the tibia, grew to a similar length alongside it.

As evolution progressed through to a group of avian dinosaurs known as the Pygostylians, the fibula became shorter than the tibia, and sharper and more splinter-like towards the end, and it no longer reached the ankle.

While modern bird embryos still show signs of developing long, dinosaur-like fibulae, as they grow, these bones become shorter, thinner, and also take on the splinter-like ends of the Pygostylian bones, and never make it far enough down to the leg to connect with the ankle.

Researchers led by Joâo Botelho from the University of Chile decided to investigate how this transition from a long, tubular fibula in dinosaurs to a short, splinter-like fibula in birds actually came to be.

They achieved this by inhibiting the expression of a gene called IHH or Indian Hedgehog (seriously), which saw their chickens continue to grow the long, dinosaur-like fibulae that originated in their embryonic form.

In doing so, the team discovered something bizarre. Regular bone development sees cell division and therefore growth halt in the shaft long before the ends stop growing, but in modern chickens, the growth of the fibula halts first at the ends. This means the fibulae of modern chickens are actively blocked from reaching the lengths of their ancient relatives' bones.

Fires caused by lightning strikes on hydrocarbon storage plants are a century-old, yet to be addressed, problem, according to research published in the International Journal of Forensic Engineering. In the era of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, this is becoming an even more poignant issue for the fossil fuel industry.

Sterling Rooke of X8 Inc in Crofton, Maryland, and Miroslaw Skibniewski of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at the University of Maryland, USA, explain that uncontrolled fires and explosions at storage facilities can cost US $10 million per incidence. Moreover, given that some facilities are in areas of high-frequency lightning storms, the threat is significant. They point out that a third of all modern hydrocarbon tank accidents are associated with lightning. Ironically, the burning of fossil fuels that has led to anthropogenic climate change during this last century, might also increase the frequency of lightning storms.

We don't want to alarm you, but researchers appear to have come a step closer to helping robots one day take over the world.

Inspired by insects and lizards, researchers at Stanford University, California have designed a tiny robot capable of shifting weights many times its size, either working solo in in groups.

The "microTug" robots use a special adhesive inspired by gecko toes to move objects over 2,000 times their weight. If this level of power was ever used against mankind, we might be in deep trouble.