The global ocean faces major threats—from illegal fishing to vanishing coastal habitats to plastic pollution. Now, a new cohort of scientists will work to bridge the knowledge gaps hindering effective ocean protections.

 

The Pew Charitable Trusts announced today that seven fellows—based in Australia, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Thailand—will receive $150,000 grants over three years to pursue conservation-focused research aimed at strengthening ocean health and the communities that depend on it.

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study, wildfire exposure and its socioeconomic consequences were associated with graded increases in psychological distress extending beyond the burn zone. These findings highlight the importance of integrating mental health care, housing stability, and economic recovery as central pillars of disaster response and climate resilience strategies. 

Climate change is lengthening our days because rising sea levels slow Earth's rotation. Researchers from the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich now show that the current increase in day length — 1.33 milliseconds per century— is unprecedented in the past 3.6 million years. The team reconstructed ancient day-length fluctuations using the fossil remains of single-celled marine organisms known as benthic foraminifera. The study has just been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

Computer scientists and weather scientists have taken the first steps toward creating an AI agent capable of analyzing and answering questions in natural language, such as English, about data from AI-driven weather and climate forecasting models. Recently, models driven by AI and deep learning have considerably improved weather forecasting. But analyzing the resulting data remains difficult and time-consuming. A main issue is that these types of AI models are not able to describe their findings in plain language. A secondary issue is that these models are not able to reason about text information, such as meteorology reports and weather bulletins. The UC San Diego research team aims to address both.