New climate models to reveal secret life of water
Grant and Award Announcement
This month, we’re focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), a topic that continues to capture attention everywhere. Here, you’ll find the latest research news, insights, and discoveries shaping how AI is being developed and used across the world.
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 1-Jan-2026 23:11 ET (2-Jan-2026 04:11 GMT/UTC)
When it comes to Earth’s climate system, water is often at the center of the story — whether it’s too much, too little or arriving at the wrong time. And while today’s climate models can tell us how much rain might fall or how humid the air might be, they often can’t answer the simpler, and perhaps more important, question: Where did this water come from? A new project led by Rice University and the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) is changing that. Backed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the initiative — called SCI-SWIM, short for sustainable community infrastructure for stable water isotope modeling — will build a new and improved version of the Community Earth System Model (CESM), which can trace water across the entire planet from the clouds in the sky to the thick ice sheets deep underground.
Recovery colleges (RCs) support personal recovery through education, skill development and social support for people with mental health problems, carers and staff. Guided by co-production and adult learning principles, RCs represent a recent mental health innovation. Since the first RC opened in England in 2009, RCs have expanded to 28 countries and territories. However, most RC research has been conducted in Western countries with similar cultural characteristics, limiting understanding of how RCs can be culturally adapted. The 12-item Recovery Colleges Characterisation and Testing (RECOLLECT) Fidelity Measure (RFM) evaluates the operational fidelity of RCs based on 12 components, but cultural influences on these components remain underexplored. The authors aimed to assess associations between Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and RFM items to identify cultural influences on fidelity components.
A new poll of 2,143 California adults conducted by University of California, Irvine researchers reveals overwhelming bipartisan support for stricter regulations on children's use of digital technology, including school smartphone restrictions and social media age limits.
To reveal the hidden norms encoded in popular AI chatbots, UC Berkeley researchers turned to the internet’s favorite source of moral dilemmas: Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” (or AITA) forum. In a recent study, which is published as a pre-print, the researchers confronted each of seven different large language models (LLMs) with more than 10,000 real-world social conflicts posted to the forum and compared their responses to those of Reddit users.