EOS

Because they are used in everything from cosmetics to dental floss to nonstick pans, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are frustratingly abundant in our environment, including in our food, rain, and drinking water. They’re persistent, too, earning their nickname “forever chemicals,” and have been linked to health effects ranging from cancers to liver toxicity to reduced fertility.

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Machine learning allows us to detect millions of tiny earthquakes, but our current tools struggle to process this “data tsunami” with high precision. While a popularized mathematical approach called “Bayesian inference” can tell us exactly how reliable an earthquake’s location is, it is usually too slow to handle such massive amounts of information. This is especially true for “double-difference”…

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Every year, the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, tracks a set of key climate indicators—including the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the Earth’s temperature—to assess how global warming is progressing. In their latest report, released last Sunday, the authors decided to include a new measure: the Earth’s energy imbalance. “Climate change is often discussed in…

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Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a relatively new technique that uses optic cable to measure ground motion along its length, effectively turning the cable into thousands of vibration sensors and which measures dynamic strain over long distances. DAS is now widely used as an alternative to conventional geophones and seismometers. In practice, DAS cables are typically buried to ensure good…

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