A major flood would hit Los Angeles Black communities disproportionately hard. A study from UC Irvine researchers does not predict when the next 100-year flood will occur.

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.

“Certain types of rocks, such as those containing basalt, are rich in divalent metal cations that naturally convert CO₂ into stable metal carbonate matter,” says co-lead author M.J. Abdolhosseini Qomi, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

The words “robotic exoskeleton” probably bring to mind futuristic soldiers and sci-fi flicks like Aliens, Iron Man, or The Wrong Trousers.

“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. Huning is the co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with U.C.