Quinton Smith: Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; University of California, Irvine.

“The common ways to measure droughts are through precipitation, soil moisture and runoff,” says Laurie S. Huning, an environmental engineer at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent work adds another dimension to that by looking at water stored in snowpack.

Wildfires in the western US have been steadily growing 

So when a mantis shrimp’s hammer smashes into a thumb or a clam or a crab’s face, any crack in its structure will propagate in a twist pattern, dissipating the energy throughout the material. … Neat, said engineers at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, who’ve invented a clever kind of material based on the mantis shrimp’s clobber-sticks. … It’s a twist within a twist: They’ve been able to get minerals to grow within a 3D-printed shrimp-inspired Bouligand structure with the help of bacteria, of all things.

That isn't a surprise to James Earthman, a UC Irvine chemical engineering and materials science professor who did a study in 2014. ... "With stainless steel we never saw any sparks," Earthman said. "When we tested a titanium club, every time we hit a rock with a titanium there were a lot of sparks."