Two Virginia high school students have discovered how sea anemones respond to salinity changes caused by hurricane rainfall. As hurricanes worsen due to climate change, this important information could help conservation efforts and inspire advocacy efforts. The research was shared in a paper published in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research on October 7.

Kyoto, Japan -- Predicting earthquakes has long been an unattainable fantasy. Factors like odd animal behaviors that have historically been thought to forebode earthquakes are not supported by empirical evidence. As these factors often occur independently of earthquakes and vice versa, seismologists believe that earthquakes occur with little or no warning. At least, that's how it appears from the surface.

Earthquake-generating zones lie deep within the Earth's crust and thus cannot be directly observed, but scientists have long proposed that faults may undergo a precursory phase before an earthquake during which micro-fracturing and slow slip occur. Yet, despite their obvious potential, exactly how these processes could enable prediction of a main shock remains unclear. Furthermore, observational studies have suggested that small and large earthquakes appear indistinguishable during the beginning of their rupture, raising doubts about the usefulness of short-term precursors.

These difficulties have prompted interest in the use of machine learning to search for potentially predictive fault signals. Machine learning models have demonstrated an ability to predict stick-slip laboratory earthquakes  in small, centimeter-scale experiments, but this approach has not yet been applied to larger, more complex systems that more closely mimic natural faults.

MIT researchers designed a device that quickly recovers drinking water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. The system uses ultrasonic waves to shake the water out of the material, recovering water in minutes. 

SRL Editor-in-Chief Allison Bent has appointed Hongfeng Yang as the first deputy editor-in-chief of its journal Seismological Research Letters (SRL).

The earliest evidence of an internal ‘GPS’ system in an animal has been identified by researchers, which could help explain how modern birds and fish evolved the ability to use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate long distances.