Cities change storms, but the impacts depend on the storm itself
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 21-May-2026 03:15 ET (21-May-2026 07:15 GMT/UTC)
Cities don’t just change the landscape, they change the weather. According to a new study analyzing tens of thousands of rain events in Texas, whether urban areas make rain worse, lighter or simply different depends strongly on the type of storm. The research, published in Nature, examines more than 40,000 warm‑season storms that passed over or near Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston between 1995 and 2017. By sorting storms into distinct categories and tracking their three‑dimensional structure using weather radar, scientists found that the four urban areas strengthen some storms while weakening others.
Researchers have uncovered a remarkable fossil site in a remote part of Canada’s Northwest Territories, offering unprecedented insight into the earliest evolution of complex animal life on Earth. Findings from the site represent life from the Ediacaran biota—soft-bodied organisms that lived on the seafloor more than 500 million years ago—and push back the origins of animal movement and sexual reproduction by 5-10 million years.
New research led by the University of Utah documents how carbon markets, a pillar of climate policy, fail to accurately account for the risks U.S. forests face from climate change. The team produced maps that show where the risk of loss from fire, insects and drought are most elevated, and therefore best avoided for forest preservation projects.
A new approach to accurately imaging objects with complex shapes and varying degrees of "shininess" could enable high-precision applications in virtual and mixed reality settings, industrial inspection and medical imaging.
Florida State University chemists have synthesized new molecules derived from bacteria found in a Pacific Ocean sea sponge, a breakthrough for the future of drug development, particularly for rare forms of cancer.