Homes that can withstand extremes: New study reveals pathways to housing resilience
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 15-Dec-2025 04:11 ET (15-Dec-2025 09:11 GMT/UTC)
A new University of Maryland study of campus air samples revealed that chemical compounds from Canada’s historic 2023 fires lingered in the air, forming an ‘atmospheric soup.’
The Reinhard Süring Foundation's 2025 Research Award goes to Leipzig-based atmospheric researcher Dr. Cristofer Jiménez for his contributions to a remote sensing technology that makes it possible to study the interactions between particles and clouds much better than ever before. The so-called dual-field-of-view polarisation lidar is based on two different aperture angles, which are used to observe and compare the reflections of laser beams in the atmosphere. Every three years, the Reinhard Süring Foundation Research Prize honours young scientists for outstanding work in a subfield of meteorology. In 2025, the prize was awarded for "New techniques, methods and applications of remote sensing of the atmosphere".
Rising greenhouse gas emissions could see the size of extreme floods in the Central Himalayas increase by between as much as 73% and 84% by the end of this century.
Higher nighttime temperatures are linked to shorter sleep times and lower sleep quality, especially for people with chronic health conditions, lower socioeconomic status, or those living on the West Coast, according to a new USC study. Researchers estimate that by 2099, people could lose up to 24 hours of sleep each year due to heat, highlighting the potential impact of climate change on sleep health. The researchers obtained data from 14,232 U.S. adults in the All of Us Research Program that was collected between 2010 and 2022. In total, the researchers analyzed more than 12 million nights of sleep, looking at how long people slept and how easily they fell asleep. They also examined 8 million nights of data on sleep stages and how often sleep was interrupted. Finally, they used location and meteorological data to find out whether sleep patterns were linked to changing temperatures. They found that a 10-degree Celsius increase in daytime temperature was associated with 2.19 minutes of lost sleep, while a 10-degree nighttime temperature increase was associated with a loss of 2.63 minutes. The effects were greater among females, people of Hispanic ethnicity, people with chronic diseases, and those with a lower socioeconomic status. In addition to shorter sleep times, rising temperatures were also associated with more disrupted sleep throughout the night and more time spent awake in bed.
Recently reported methane signatures detected by the James Webb Space Telescope could be a hint to it potentially harboring life, but a University of Arizona researcher urges caution. Sukrit Ranjan argues that it is not clear whether TRAPPIST-1e has an atmosphere at all and whether the methane signature could originate from its host star instead.