CLIMATEWIRE | Disasters forced more than 26 million people in 148 countries to leave their homes in 2023, underscoring the growing dangers of more frequent floods, storms, wildfires, and droughts.
Last year saw among the highest number of weather-related displacements in the last decade, though fewer than in 2022, according to an annual report by the International Displacement Monitoring Centre. The report, released Tuesday, also found that conflict and violence triggered another 20.5 million displacements in 2023.
Altogether, 75.9 million people were living in “internal displacement” in dozens of countries last year, including tens of millions of people displaced in previous years and still unable to return to their homes.
The report warns that disasters frequently overlap with conflict and violence, dramatically worsening outcomes for affected people. Forty-five countries and territories reported conflict-related displacements in 2023, and all but three of them also reported displacements from disasters as well.
“While the numbers fluctuate year-on-year, disaster-related displacements remain high, in nearly every corner of the world and often intertwined with conflict dynamics in fragile settings,” wrote Robert Piper, special adviser on solutions to internal displacement to the United Nations secretary general, in the report’s forward.
For example, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by floods last fall in Somalia, a country already wracked by severe drought and long-term civil war.
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Men walk past debris of buildings caused by flash floods in Derna, eastern Libya, on September 11, 2023. AFP via Getty Images
As the school year ends, many students will be only too happy to see math classes in their rearview mirrors. It may seem to some of us non-mathematicians that geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form of torture, so imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years.
We met Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans. We expected to find two mathematical prodigies.
Instead, we found at St. Mary’s Academy, all students are told their possibilities are boundless.
Come Mardi Gras season, New Orleans is alive with colorful parades, replete with floats, and beads, and high school marching bands.
In a city where uniqueness is celebrated, St. Mary’s stands out – with young African American women playing trombones and tubas, twirling batons and dancing – doing it all, which defines St. Mary’s, students told us.
Junior Christina Blazio says the school instills in them they have the ability to accomplish anything.
Christina Blazio: That is kinda a standard here. So we aim very high – like, our aim is excellence for all students.
The private Catholic elementary and high school sits behind the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent in New Orleans East. The academy was started by an African American nun for young Black women just after the Civil War. The church still supports the school with the help of alumni.
In December 2022, seniors Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson were working on a school-wide math contest that came with a cash prize. tangie
It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r.” My failure to do so was the last marker of my Americanness, and I could only do it if I concentrated, moving the sound backward in my mouth and exhaling at the same time. Now I was saying something in English — “reheat” or “rehash” — and the “r” was refusing to come forward. The word felt like a piece of dough stuck in my throat.
Other changes began to push into my speech. I realized that when my husband spoke to me in English, I would answer him in French. My mother called, and I heard myself speaking with a French accent. Drafts of my articles were returned with an unusual number of comments from editors. Then I told a friend about a spill at the grocery store, which — the words “conveyor belt” vanishing mid-sentence — took place on a “supermarket treadmill.” Even back home in New York, I found my mouth puckered into the fish lips that allow for the particularly French sounds of “u,” rather than broadened into the long “ay” sounds that punctuate English.
My mother is American, and my father is French; they split up when I was about 3 months old. I grew up speaking one language exclusively with one half of my family in New York and the other language with the other in France. It’s a standard of academic literature on bilingual people that different languages bring out different aspects of the self. But these were not two different personalities but two separate lives. In one version, I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side and walking up Columbus Avenue to get to school. In the other, I was foraging for mushrooms in Alsatian forests or writing plays with my cousins and later three half-siblings, who at the time didn’t understand a word of English. The experience of either language was entirely distinct, as if I had been given two scripts with mirroring supportive casts. In each a parent, grandparents, aunts, and uncles; in each, a language, a home, a Madeleine.
I moved to Paris in October 2020, on the heels of my 30th birthday. This was both a rational decision and something of a Covid-spurred dare. I had been working as a journalist and editor for several years, specializing in European politics, and had reported across Germany and Spain in those languages. I had never professionally used French, in which I was technically fluent. It seemed like a good idea to try.
A massive group of sunspots has produced the largest flare of the current solar cycle—but the stunning auroral spectacles that Earth enjoyed in recent days are unlikely to resume, experts say.
The sunspot cluster, known as active region 3664 (AR3664), broke a record on Tuesday when it emitted the largest flare to date of our sun’s current activity cycle. This X8.7-class flare peaked at 12:51 P.M. EDT, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which monitors the sun’s activity and its potential impacts on Earth.
A sunspot is a magnetic knot on the sun in which cooler temperatures make that part of the star’s surface appear darker than surrounding areas. These structures often produce solar flares—essentially huge flashes of high-energy light that, if pointed at Earth, can reach our planet in about eight minutes, sometimes trailed by slower-moving energetic particles that are also ejected by the blasts. Sunspots can also spark coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are enormous clouds of charged plasma that can strike our planet within days of erupting from the sun.
At one point, this particular sunspot region stretched some 16 times the width of Earth. The size drew comparisons to the active region that produced the infamous 1859 Carrington Event, a massive solar storm that interrupted telegraph service worldwide and lit up our planet’s skies with auroral displays. A similar solar storm today could damage vital infrastructure such as power grids, communications systems and GPS navigation satellites. The impacts of AR3664 have been generally benign, however, despite the dramatic outbursts.
Beginning on May 7, AR3664 shot out a spree of half a dozen CMEs that started to reach Earth just after 12:30 P.M. EDT on May 10 and produced stunning auroras that night. The auroras occurred in both hemispheres and stretched as far from our planet’s poles as Puerto Rico and Mexico. The spectacle came with minimal downsides, although airplane flights were rerouted to avoid higher radiation levels near the poles, high-frequency radio systems experienced interference, and farmers who used precision GPS to steer tractors reported glitches as well.
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A massive solar flare that occurred on May 14, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.
Rachel Feltman: Cannabis is supposed to help you chill out, but finding the right dose to induce those calming effects is notoriously difficult. Just a little too much can send a cannabis user spinning out in the opposite direction. Recreational users sometimes call this acute anxiety and panic “paranoia,” and it’s a common complaint from people seeking emergency care for cannabis-induced intoxication.
New research offers some hope for folks who have trouble finding a relaxing high—and it comes from a surprising source.
For Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. Scientific American’s associate news editor Allison Parshall is with me to tell us more about these new findings.
Feltman: So I hear you’ve got some exciting news for the anxious weed smokers of the world.
Allison Parshall: Yes!
Feltman: What’s this new study all about?
Parshall: If you’ve ever smoked too much weed or taken one too many THC gummies, you might be familiar with this side effect that stoners have long called paranoia—just, like, this acute feeling of anxiety and panic, like the world is just collapsing around you and/or everything is bad and terrible, and you kind of just have to ride it out. It’s one of the main things that people complain about when they show up for emergency health care after having taken too much cannabis.
Feltman: Sure, yeah.
Parshall: It’s just kind of gnarly.
So basically, in the new study, they found that one of the aromatic compounds in weed—basically it’s just there to smell nice; it’s called d-limonene—can actually reduce these anxious side effects and make people have this paranoia reaction less.
Feltman: You mentioned in your article for Scientific American that some of the researchers were kind of surprised that this aromatic compound had this effect. Why was that?
Parshall: One of the researchers that I talked to—he was the senior researcher; his name was Ryan Vandrey—he was surprised mostly ’cause he was coming at it from more of a skeptical perspective. He wasn’t necessarily expecting that these compounds called terpenes, of which d-limonene is one, would actually have a measurable impact, just because they’re present in such small quantities in cannabis. Like, Vandrey estimated that maybe you get d-limonene as 1 percent of the compounds in any given strain; it depends on the strain.
At some point during the next several months, a distant, dead star will rapidly grow brighter in a powerful explosion, making it visible from Earth for a short period of time. To observers on the ground, it will look like a new star.
The dead star—which is currently not bright enough to appear in the sky—is one of a pair that orbit each other in a binary system called T Coronae Borealis, or T CrB. Known as a white dwarf, this leftover stellar core is snatching material from its neighboring red giant. When it gathers enough, roughly every 80 years or so, the white dwarf releases energy in a bright outburst, according to NASA.
Astronomers excitedly await the short-lived event. “When T CrB goes off, a large fraction of every telescope in the world is going to be pointed at it,” Bradley Schaefer, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University, tells Scientific American’s Robin George Andrews.
T CrB is located 3,000 light-years from Earth. The astronomer John Birmingham observed its outburst from western Ireland two explosions ago, in 1866, according to Nicole Mortillaro of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Then, it flared up again in 1946. There’s also evidence that it was seen in 1787 and 1217, per the New York Times’ Robin George Andrews.
Such an event is called a nova—a rapid increase in the brightness of a white dwarf that reignites after years of slumber. These outbursts are different than supernovae, which are much more dramatic. Supernovae occur when a dying star erupts in a release of energy that can briefly outshine galaxies.
In systems like T CrB, a white dwarf is locked in a dance with a red giant, a star that has run out of fuel and begun to die. The red giant swells in size, its temperature and pressure increasing, and starts to eject its outer layers. A lot of this material is hydrogen gas, which gets slurped up by the white dwarf. Eventually, the white dwarf grows hot enough on its surface—a temperature of about 10 million Kelvin—to produce a nuclear explosion.
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In an artist’s rendering, a red giant star and white dwarf star circle each other. Material ejected from the red giant gathers and heats in the white dwarf, catalyzing a bright explosion. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
First impressions are crucial as they often set the tone for future interactions. Crafting a positive and memorable first impression can open doors and create lasting relationships. Here are my top 10 tips for making a fantastic first impression, along with psychological insights into each one. 1. Prepare Yourself Mentally Before any interaction, it’s essential […]
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American
In an artist’s rendering, a red giant star and white dwarf star circle each other. Material ejected from the red giant gathers and heats in the white dwarf, catalyzing a bright explosion. 
James' World 2 