Iran’s current drought is the worst for at least 40 years and water levels are shrinking “at a time of year when you would normally expect storage to be recovering, not collapsing further,” said Amir AghaKouchak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine. … The government’s aim to achieve food self-sufficiency … is largely responsible for the situation, experts say. “For decades, policies have encouraged the expansion of irrigated agriculture in arid regions,” AghaKouchak said.

Now there’s new research from Glenn Healey and Lequan Wang in the electrical engineering and computer science departments at the University of California, Irvine which shows that as the seam height changes, the movement on pitches changes. By using optical and radar tracking, and correcting for weather effects, Healey and Wang were able to graph the movement of pitches by season in major league baseball.

You can take a pregnancy test or colon cancer test from your bathroom, or, these days, a COVID-19 test from the comfort of your living room. You might one day be able to get a breast cancer screening at home, too, if you have a urine sample and an artificial nose. That’s the vision behind The Blue Box, a startup competing this week at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield.

Researchers who study this tangled web of crises call them “cascading disasters”—disasters that trigger other disasters like falling dominoes. As the climate warms, they are becoming increasingly common. Many risk analysts, though, still treat each disaster as a discrete event, according to Amir AghaKouchak at UC Irvine and Farshid Vahedifard at Mississippi State University. Read More