320 articles from WEDNESDAY 14.7.2021

Facebook drops funding for interface that reads the brain

The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech’s campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk’s new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people’s brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that its secretive skunkworks, named Building 8, was attempting to...

Fire operations-prescribed burning combo reduces wildfire severity up to 72%

Firefighters battling wildfires in the western United States use a variety of suppression tactics to get the flames under control. Prescribed burns, or controlled fires intentionally set to clear shrubs and forest litter before a wildfire ever ignites, can make fire suppression operations almost three times as effective in limiting wildfire severity, according to a new study by researchers from...

The delicate balance of protecting river deltas and society

Hundreds of millions of people live on river deltas around the world, making them central to rich diversity in culture and thriving economies. As deltas face environmental degradation and ongoing climate change, governments have sought ever more drastic measures to prevent flooding and protect society and its infrastructure. But, these policies can harm the natural environment and lead to loss of...

Watching subsurface defects as they move

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist and collaborators have demonstrated the first-ever "defect microscope" that can track how populations of defects deep inside macroscopic materials move collectively.