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CLIMATEWIRE | Back-to-back disasters rocked Houston last year, when a powerful derecho struck the city in May, followed by Hurricane Beryl in July. Both events brought gale-force winds to the densely built downtown, with gusts exceeding 90 miles per hour.

But after the storms, researchers noticed something strange. The derecho caused more damage than the hurricane to Houston’s tallest buildings.

Now, scientists say there’s a need for more research on the impacts of powerful downbursts in urban centers. That’s especially true for places like Houston, the Gulf Coast’s largest city, where thunderstorms and hurricanes can both wreak havoc.

In a new study, published Friday in the scientific journal Frontiers in Built Environment, researchers from Florida International University demonstrated that different kinds of storms — which produce distinct wind patterns — can pose different threats to tall buildings.

Both hurricanes and derechos can produce high-speed winds. But derechos — long-lasting wind storms often associated with bands of thunderstorms — have unique traits. They’re often characterized by sudden bursts of winds that move in straight lines, often causing damage that radiates outward in a single direction.

The researchers compared the damage caused by last year’s storms on several of Houston’s tall buildings, each at least 600 feet tall. These include the Chevron Building Auditorium, Wells Fargo Plaza, Enterprise Plaza, Wedge International Tower and the Total Energies Tower.

Each of these buildings is designed to withstand gusts up to 150 mph — yet many still sustained significant damage, particularly during the derecho. The researchers noted that an assessment of 18 buildings revealed more than 3,000 broken windows during the storm. Hurricane Beryl, on the other hand, caused significantly less glass damage than the derecho.

The researchers wanted to know why there was such a difference between the two storms. So they conducted a series of experiments in a special wind chamber housed at FIU, altering the airflow to simulate the patterns of derechos versus hurricanes. Model buildings inside the chamber helped them evaluate the impacts of the strong winds on the built environment.

They found that derecho winds can produce unique forces compared with hurricanes, including stronger suction on the walls of city buildings, allowing them to dislodge glass panels and shatter windows. The findings suggest that even buildings designed for strong winds aren’t necessarily resilient for all kinds of storms.

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Before Central Park was created, the landscape along what is now the Park’s perimeter from West 82nd to West 89th Street was the site of Seneca Village, a community of predominantly African-Americans, many of whom owned property. By 1855, the village consisted of approximately 225 residents, made up of roughly two-thirds African-Americans, one-third Irish immigrants, and a small number of individuals of German descent. One of few African-American enclaves at the time, Seneca Village allowed residents to live away from the more built-up sections of downtown Manhattan and escape the unhealthy conditions and racial discrimination they faced there.

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Nearly 200 years ago, Central Park’s landscape near the West 85th Street entrance was home to Seneca Village, a community of predominately free African-American property owners.

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I’m a psychologist, and AI is coming for my job. The signs are everywhere: a client showing me how ChatGPT helped her better understand her relationship with her parents; a friend ditching her in-person therapist to process anxiety with Claude; a startup raising $40 million to build a super-charged-AI-therapist. The other day on TikTok, I came across an influencer sharing how she doesn’t need friends; she can just vent to God and ChatGPT. The post went viral, and thousands commented, including:

“ChatGPT talked me out of self-sabotaging.”

“It knows me better than any human walking this earth.”

“No fr! After my grandma died, I told chat gpt to tell me something motivational… and it had me crying from the response.”

I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t make me terrified. I love my work—and I don’t want to be replaced. And while AI might help make therapy more readily available for all, beneath my personal fears, lies an even more unsettling thought: whether solving therapy’s accessibility crisis might inadvertently spark a crisis of human connection.

Therapy is a field ripe for disruption. Bad therapists are, unfortunately, a common phenomenon, while good therapists are hard to find. When you do manage to find a good therapist, they often don’t take insurance and almost always charge a sizable fee that, over time, can really add up. AI therapy could fill an immense gap. In the U.S. alone, more than half of adults with mental health issues do not receive the treatment they need. With the help of AI, any person could access a highly skilled therapist, tailored to their unique needs, at any time. It would be revolutionary.

But great technological innovations always come with tradeoffs, and the shift to AI therapy has deeper implications than 1 million mental health professionals potentially losing their jobs.  AI therapists, when normalized, have the potential to reshape how we understand intimacy, vulnerability, and what it means to connect.

Throughout most of human history, emotional healing wasn’t something you did alone with a therapist in an office. Instead, for the average person facing loss, disappointment, or interpersonal struggles, healing was embedded in communal and spiritual frameworks. Religious figures and shamans played central roles—offering rituals, medicines, and moral guidance. In the 17th century, Quakers developed a notable practice called “clearness committees,” where community members would gather to help an individual find answers to personal questions through careful listening and honest inquiry. These communal approaches to healing came with many advantages, as they provided people with social bonds and shared meaning. But they also had a dark side: emotional struggles could be viewed as moral failings, sins, or even signs of demonic influence, sometimes leading to stigmatization and cruel treatment.

The birth of modern psychology in the West during the late 19th century marked a profound shift. When Sigmund Freud began treating patients in his Vienna office, he wasn’t merely pioneering psychoanalysis—he was transforming how people dealt with life’s everyday challenges. As sociologist Eva Illouz notes in her book, Saving the Modern Soul, Freud gave “the ordinary self a new glamour, as if it were waiting to be discovered and fashioned.” By convincing people that common struggles—from sadness to heartbreak to family conflict —required professional exploration, Freud helped move emotional healing from the communal sphere into the privacy of the therapist’s office.

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Among the slew of actions that President Donald Trump has taken during his first weeks back in office has been a barrage of attacks on federal scientists and scientific funding. The administration’s science agencies have fired thousands of employees, attempted to freeze research disbursements and proposed new policies that would reduce funding into the future.

Against this backdrop, a team of early-career researchers is organizing nationwide rallies on March 7 to “Stand Up for Science”—a call for people across the U.S. to demonstrate to show their appreciation of science and its benefits to society. Rallies will take place in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Nashville, Tenn., Austin, Tex., and many other places across the country. The network of stationary rallies is set to take place eight years after the March for Science protests that met Trump’s first administration—which Stand Up for Science’s organizers hope helped prepare scientists to wade into politics.

To learn about Stand Up for Science’s plans and goals, Scientific American talked with three of its lead organizers: Colette Delawalla, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at Emory University, Emma Courtney, a Ph.D. candidate in biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Sam Goldstein, a Ph.D. candidate in health behavior at the University of Florida.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How did each of you come to this place of wanting to step into activism?

DELAWALLA: I was just really mad. At the end of the day, I just want to do my research. I really think that studying addiction is important, and all science is important. But it really hit home for me, personally. I was angry, and it just seemed like everybody else was angry, too, and nobody else was doing anything about it. And, you know, “be the change you want to see in the world,” as cheesy as that is.

Are you connected at all to the 2017 March for Science?

DELAWALLA: Nobody in our core leadership team overlaps with people who were in the March for Science core leadership team. But we have been in contact with a number of the organizers from that group, and they seem to be really supportive and kind and generous with their advice and time and connections. And we’re so grateful.

We really appreciate that they were so ahead of their time in understanding that what was coming down the pipe in 2017 was really serious. They laid the groundwork for people to have a working conception of what it means for scientists and people who believe in science to come together. Without that foundation, I don’t know that we would have had as much success.

GOLDSTEIN: It feels sort of like a passing of the baton—we probably wouldn’t have known where to really start.

COURTNEY: What I have found really impactful in talking with the March for Science organizers is the event, day of, is really important. But it’s also about building a sustained movement that actually drives policy change.

“We’re trying to give folks somewhere they can feel powerful and have their voices heard.”What does a successful day on March 7 look like for you?

DELAWALLA: We want thousands and thousands of people to come. All over the U.S., we want people to put down their science, put down the pipette, close their R script, cancel their run-throughs of their experiments that day and come out. That is our number one goal for March 7.

Additionally, we want this to come up on the public’s and our government representatives’ radar. We do have plans to be meeting elected officials in Washington, D.C., in the week leading up to the rally. The goal is that we start off with a bang. This is sort of the science block party to really launch the demands into public view and to start the work on seeing them met.

GOLDSTEIN: It feels like this is only the beginning of the conversation. This is really just, across America, giving folks that maybe feel a lot of despair across this first month an outlet to feel heard and understood and comforted by like-minded individuals. Despair can sometimes breed apathy. The more it hits you, the more you doomscroll, the more you just feel powerless. We’re trying to give folks somewhere they can feel powerful and have their voices heard.

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