Media Watch

Amir Aghakouchak, professor of engineering at UC Irvine, et al., write: “Clean air is fundamental for human survival, yet it is often compromised in urban areas, and megacities emit enormous quantities of pollutants into the air.”

Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, sees electricity produced from hydrogen as the inevitable choice of the shipping industry for three reasons ... “It will be an evolution and a changeover in the population of ships over many decades,” Samuelsen said.

Computational experiments, including ones by Freeland, have compared the resilience of the real genetic code with that of potential alternatives, in which codons were assigned arbitrarily to amino acids. Nature’s genetic code outperformed nearly all of them. “For what we have,” said Chang Liu, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, Irvine, “it’s better than a one-in-a-million code.”

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and others, are rolling out a new worldwide satellite-based drought severity index. Relying on data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission, called GRACE, the index adds groundwater storage to drought assessments, augmenting commonly used tools most often based on the amount of precipitation. Researchers announcing the index say it will “provide for accurate and continuous drought monitoring” worldwide.