UPDATE: Branson's done it. "In a live broadcast during the vehicle's descent, Branson called the trip, 'an experience of a lifetime,'" reports NBC News: Branson's flight took off Sunday morning at around 10:30 a.m. ET, although the launch time was delayed by around 90 minutes because of overnight weather conditions at Spaceport America...

Branson was joined on his flight by pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci and three mission specialists, all of whom are employees of Virgin Galactic: Chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses, lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and government affairs vice president Sirisha Bandla.

Virgin Galactic is expected to conduct several additional test flights before beginning commercial operations with private customers next year. The company has said the suborbital joyrides will likely cost more than $250,000 each, but final pricing has not yet been announced...

"It's taken 17 years to get to this flight, and of course a lot of personal wealth has been poured into it, but it also shows that this takes tenacity," said Greg Autry, a space policy expert at Arizona State University.
Earlier in the day, Virgin Galactic's Twitter feed shared a nice clip of the astronauts arriving on the launch site.

CBS News streamed their own live coverage at the top of this web page (as well as in their CBSN app), but also reported on the other options: With typical Branson fanfare, Sunday's flight will be broadcast live across Virgin Galactic's social media platforms, featuring appearances by Stephen Colbert and retired Canadian space station astronaut Chris Hadfield, along with the performance of a new song by singer-songwriter Khalid. Even SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to be watching. "Will see you there to wish you the best," he tweeted Saturday.
And what did Jeff Bezos have to say before Branson launched his history-making flight? "Wishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!"

Saturday CBS News offered this description of Branson's hopes: Richard Branson, the globe-trotting media mogul and founder of Virgin Galactic, plans to rocket into space Sunday morning on a flight that would make him the first owner of a private space company to launch aboard one of his own spacecraft. If all goes well, he will beat rival Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin, who is set to launch on July 20. Branson, two company pilots and three Virgin Galactic crewmates are launching from Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on what's expected to be at least an hour-long flight, reaching altitudes a little over 50 miles above the Earth.

To stay warm in frigid seas, the marine mammals rely on an unexpected use of the powerhouses of their cells. From a report: Sea otters run hot. It's not just a manner of speaking: Scientists have found that the furry mammals' metabolisms work at a rate three times what might normally be expected from a creature their size, burning swiftly through calories. They seem to be using much of that energy to generate heat, keeping themselves at a toasty 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the frigid ocean, where staying warm is a matter of life and death. But the details of their conversion of food and oxygen into vast reserves of heat have been obscure. Now researchers studying sea otters' muscles report that the feat involves using the mitochondria in their muscle cells in an unexpected way. Their study was published Thursday in the journal Science.

Unlike whales and polar bears, sea otters don't have a thick insulating layer of blubber, and their celebrated fur -- the thickest in the world, with up to 2.6 million hairs per square inch -- is not enough on its own to keep them alive in an ocean that can hover on the edge of freezing. Muscles generate heat as they contract, but scientists have known for some time there is another way that muscles can help animals keep warm, a cellular process with the delightful name of proton leak. Inside almost all animal cells, little pill-shaped organelles called mitochondria break down sugar molecules to extract energy. (Mitochondria are often called the powerhouses of the cell.) During the final stage of this process, protons pop through a membrane. In biology textbooks, the protons helpfully trickle through tiny spinning pores, driving them like water wheels to make adenosine triphosphate, a compound that serves as the molecular battery powering cellular processes.

The risk of pathogens spilling over from wildlife trade and farmed animals into humans should be key considerations in efforts to prevent the next pandemic, research suggests. From a report: Researchers have been assessing the risks of the different ways that disease-causing organisms jump from animals to humans in an effort to characterise and address the risk of the next pandemic. In a study published in the journal Biological Reviews, University of Cambridge scientists found that while the risk of another pandemic cannot be eliminated, systemic changes in the way we interact with animals, in general, could substantially minimise the probability.

The risks are not just linked to exotic wild animals, they caution. "There's a natural tendency, particularly in the western world, to imagine that this has nothing to do with us. It's something remote and exotic ⦠something that someone else has been doing," said the study's lead author Dr Silviu Petrovan, a veterinarian and wildlife expert at Cambridge. "I suppose what most people have in their minds is not the venison that they buy in Waitrose -- which, of course, is wildlife -- but rather something altogether more exotic."

Indian scientists have discovered a new plant species in Antarctica. From a report: Polar biologists stumbled upon a species of moss during an expedition to the ice-covered continent in 2017. Identification is laborious, and it took the scientists five years to confirm that the species had been discovered for the first time. The peer-reviewed paper describing this discovery has been accepted in the leading international journal, Journal of Asia-Pacific Biodiversity. The biologists, based in the Central University of Punjab, have named the specie Bryum Bharatiensis. Bharati is the Hindu goddess of learning and the name of one of India's Antarctic research stations. Prof Felix Bast, a biologist who was part of the six-month-long expedition to the continent - the 36th by Indian scientists - discovered the dark green specie at Larsemann Hills, overlooking the Southern Ocean, in January 2017. This is located near Bharati, one of the remotest research stations in the world.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As we carefully map the stars of our Milky Way, we're able to identify features that tell us of its history. These include local details, such as the stars that have passed through an area from which something would be able to detect Earth. And it includes far larger structures, like the trails of stars left behind by smaller galaxies that have merged with our own. But one feature we've discovered has been a bit confusing: trails of stars that are too small and thin to have come from a galaxy collision. There are dozens of them that we've not identified a source for. Their size suggests they came from a globular cluster, but there's no obvious mechanism for these clusters to eject stars at a rate sufficient to generate this sort of stream. Now, a team of researchers has suggested a not-so-obvious mechanism: Over time, clusters may become dominated by black holes that eject all the stars.

Globular clusters are dense groups of stars that orbit the Milky Way together. They're held in association by their mutual gravity. Complex interactions will inevitably eject some of the stars, but not at an appreciable rate, which makes the clusters extremely long-lived. The researchers started their work, however, by looking at an unusual globular cluster called Palomar 5. It has both extended tails of lost stars, and its total mass is relatively small, making it diffuse compared to other clusters we've studied. The lower density makes it easier for Palomar 5 to lose stars, but it could also have been caused by past star loss, creating a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. So, the researchers decided to model globular cluster evolution and try to find a model that could produce something that looks like Palomar 5. The researchers created a model that takes a cluster of stars and models their gravitational interactions with each other and the Milky Way as they orbit the galactic center. Thanks to some help from a cluster of GPUs and the right software, they were able to run these simulations for billions of years. By changing the parameters, they could find which factors were associated with clusters that ended up looking like Palomar 5.

Tantalizing evidence has been uncovered for a mysterious population of "free-floating" planets, planets that may be alone in deep space, unbound to any host star. The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Phys.Org reports: The study, led by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester, UK, (now based at the Open University, UK) used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. During this two-month campaign, Kepler monitored a crowded field of millions of stars near the center of our Galaxy every 30 minutes in order to find rare gravitational microlensing events. The study team found 27 short-duration candidate microlensing signals that varied over timescales of between an hour and 10 days. Many of these had been previously seen in data obtained simultaneously from the ground. However, the four shortest events are new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth. These new events do not show an accompanying longer signal that might be expected from a host star, suggesting that these new events may be free-floating planets. Such planets may perhaps have originally formed around a host star before being ejected by the gravitational tug of other, heavier planets in the system. Confirming the existence and nature of free-floating planets will be a major focus for upcoming missions such as the NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and possibly the ESA Euclid mission, both of which will be optimized to look for microlensing signals.

Americans gobbled up fewer fossil fuels in 2020 than they have in three decades, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The Verge reports: Consumption of petroleum, natural gas, and coal dropped by 9 percent last year compared to 2019, the biggest annual decrease since the EIA started keeping track in 1949. The COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for much of the fall as people stayed home to curb the spread of the virus and used less gas. In April 2020, oil prices nosedived below zero because there was so little demand. The U.S. transportation sector alone used up 15 percent less energy in 2020 compared to the year before. Higher temperatures last winter also helped to cut energy demand for heating, according to the EIA. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels plummeted to a near 40-year low.

That downward trend will have to continue in order to stave off the climate crisis. Upon rejoining the Paris climate agreement, President Joe Biden committed the U.S. to slash its planet-heating pollution in half this decade from near-peak levels it reached in 2005. That's part of a global effort to keep global warming from surpassing a point that life on Earth would struggle to adapt to, a global average temperature that's roughly 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. To hit that goal, there should be no further investments in new fossil fuel projects, according to a recent landmark report from the International Energy Agency. The oil and gas industries are already feeling the crunch from lawsuits and activist investors forcing them to move faster toward more sustainable forms of energy.

Nordic countries have registered near-record temperatures over the weekend, including highs of 34C (93.2F) in some places. From a report: The latest figures came after Finland's national meteorological institute registered its hottest temperature for June since records began in 1844. Kevo, in Lapland, recorded heat of 33.6C (92.5F) on Sunday, the hottest day since 1914 when authorities registered 34.7C (94.5F), said the STT news agency. Several parts of Sweden also reported record highs for June.

The high temperatures follow the record-breaking heatwave and wildfires that have caused devastation in parts of North America. The intense heatwave has killed 95 people in the US state of Oregon alone, its governor said on Sunday. Hundreds are believed to have died from the heat in the US north-west and south-western Canada. Experts and officials fear that the catastrophic conditions, fuelled by the climate crisis, will only get worse through the coming months. Michael Reeder, a professor of meteorology in the school of Earth, atmosphere and environment at Australia's Monash University, said the events on the European and North American continents were linked.

India's CNN-News18 reports: [P]revious research has found that how cells pick a particular repair strategy can be influenced by the microgravity conditions in space. Scientists are concerned that DNA repairs influenced by microgravity conditions may not be adequate, and can lead to harmful consequences. To study the DNA repair process in space, scientists have developed a new technique that uses CRISPR/Cas9 — a gene-editing technology — to recreate precise damages so that cells can be observed repairing them. The team of researchers led by Sarah Stahl-Rommel has successfully demonstrated the technique and its viability aboard the International Space Station.
"CRISPR gene editing is no longer confined to Earth," reports Engadget: The new approach clears the way for other research around DNA repair in space. With enough work, the scientists hope they can replicate the genetic damage from ionizing radiation, not to mention other effects from long-term spaceflight. That, in turn, could help NASA and other agencies develop technology that shields astronauts and makes deep space exploration practical. There's a chance CRISPR might play an important role in getting humans to Mars and beyond.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As early as 1958, the oil industry was hiring scientists and engineers to research the role that burning fossil fuels plays in global warming. The goal at the time was to help the major oil conglomerates understand how changes in the earth's atmosphere may affect the industry -- and their bottom line. But what top executives gained was an early preview of the climate crisis, decades before the issue reached public consciousness. What those scientists discovered -- and what the oil companies did with that information -- is at the heart of two dozen lawsuits attempting to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for their role in climate change.

Many of those cases hinge on the industry's own internal documents that show how, 40 years ago, researchers predicted the rising global temperatures with stunning accuracy. But looking back, many of those same scientists say they were hardly whistleblowers out to take down big oil. Some researchers later testified before Congress, using their insider knowledge to highlight the ways in which the oil industry misled the public. Others say they have few qualms with how the petroleum giants handled their research. Few, however, could have predicted the imprint their work would have on history in efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for our climate emergency. The Guardian tracked down three of those scientists to see how they view their role today.

Residents of a Canadian village which recorded the country's highest ever temperature, 49.6C (121.3F), have been forced to flee by a wildfire. From a report: A small B.C. village that endured the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Canada for days on end this week was engulfed in flames Wednesday night and residents were forced to flee, many without their belongings. Mayor Jan Polderman says he told everyone to leave Lytton, as a fire rapidly spread into the community of about 250 people. He signed the official evacuation order at 6 p.m. PT. "It's dire. The whole town is on fire," Polderman told CBC News. "It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere." He said he told residents to head for the nearby community of Boston Bar, and was on his way there himself. A reception centre has also been set up in Merritt to the east, and other residents have taken shelter in Lillooet to the north. "At the First Nation band office, the fire was a wall about three, four feet high coming up to the fence line. I drove through town and it was just smoke, flames, the wires were down," Polderman said. Video captured by residents rushing out of town show numerous structures on fire in every direction.

Earlier today at around 11:45 AM EDT, Virgin Orbit successfully launched its first commercial satellites from their LauncherOne rocket, which blasted off from beneath the wing of a Boeing 747. TechCrunch reports: On board, Virgin Orbit carried seven payloads, including the first-ever defense satellite for the Netherlands, as well as cubsats developed by the U.S. Department of Defense for its Rapid Agile Launch initiative. The initiative is seeking to test the viability of flying small spacecraft to space on relatively short notice on launch platforms with increased flexibility, which Virgin Orbit's provides thanks to its ability to take off horizontally from more or less conventional runways. Virgin Orbit also carried two Earth observation satellites for Polish startup SatRevolution, and it will be delivering more in future flights to help build out that company's planned 14-spacecraft constellation.

In January, Virgin Orbit completed its final demonstration mission, reaching orbit for the first time with LauncherOne. That paved the way for this mission, and the company plans to increase the pace and frequency of its commercial missions, with at least one more planned tentatively for later this year and many more in 2022. In terms of payload capacity, Virgin Orbit's Launcher One can carry around 1,100 pounds to low Earth orbit, which compares favorably with the capacity of Rocket Lab's Electron, which can carry around 661 pounds to the same destination.

The heat is expected to continue for several days in some parts of British Columbia, according to weather warnings from the government. From a report: Vancouverites were frying eggs on pans placed on their terraces. One man checked into an air-conditioned five-star hotel, after the five fans aimed at his bed at home and the seventh cold shower failed to bring relief. Lettuce plants shriveled in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia's picturesque wine region. Flowers wilted. People wilted. The heat wave across western Canada has much of a country known for its sweater weather sweating. Canada broke a national heat record on Sunday when the temperature in a small town in British Columbia reached almost 116 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking an 84-year-old record by nearly 3 degrees, with dangerously hot weather expected to continue for several more days.

"This is a complete shock to a Canadian -- this feels like Las Vegas or India -- not Vancouver," said Chris Johnson, a criminal lawyer who on Monday was heading to an air-conditioned hotel room as temperatures inside his home reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Tying any one weather event to climate change requires extensive attribution analysis, but heat waves around the world are growing more frequent, longer-lasting and more dangerous, experts say. David Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada, a government agency, said the early timing of this one, its intensity and its duration, could all be attributable to rising global temperatures.

A team of researchers from Spain, France and the U.S. has found evidence of a glauconitic-like clay on Mars that suggests the planet once had habitable conditions. Phys.Org reports: In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the group describes their study of clay minerals extracted from Gale Crater by Curiosity rover back in 2016 and what they found. Back in 2016, NASA's Curiosity rover drilled into the Martian surface inside of Gale Crater. The rover then extracted samples of the clay minerals and used its instruments to analyze the material. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a close look at the results of the analysis and found that it very closely resembles glauconitic clays here on Earth.

Glauconite is an iron potassium phyllosilicate mineral. It is almost always found as ovoid shapes in sediment beds, carbonates and sandstones -- formation requires stable conditions over a long period. This is what makes the discovery of a similar clay on Mars so exciting -- it suggests that it likely formed under stable conditions for a long time, perhaps millions of years. And that suggests that for at least one part of Mars, conditions were, to some extent, suitable for life over millions of years. [...] The researchers note that their findings are not evidence of life on Mars, but suggest that there was a time during which conditions on the surface were favorable for its presence.

The amount of water in the atmosphere of Venus is so low that even the most drought-tolerant of Earth's microbes wouldn't be able to survive there, a new study has found. However, the researchers looked at data from other planets too and found that the clouds of Jupiter do provide sufficient water activity to theoretically support life. Space.com reports: The new study looked at measurements from probes that flew through the atmosphere of Venus and acquired data about temperature, humidity and pressure in the thick sulphuric acid clouds surrounding the planet. From these values, the scientists were able to calculate the so-called water activity, the water vapor pressure inside the individual molecules in the clouds, which is one of the limiting factors for the existence of life on Earth. The findings are likely a disappointment for the Venus research community, which was invigorated last September by the discovery of phosphine, a compound made of atoms of phosphorus and hydrogen that on Earth can be associated with living organisms, in Venus' atmosphere. At that time, researchers suggested the phosphines may be produced by microorganisms residing in those clouds. On Earth [...] microorganisms can survive and proliferate in droplets of water in the atmosphere when temperatures allow. However, the findings of the new study, based on data from several Venus probes, leave zero chance of anything living in the clouds of Venus [...].

However, the researchers looked at data from other planets too and found that the clouds of Jupiter do provide sufficient water activity to theoretically support life. Data collected by the Galileo probe at altitudes between 26 and 42 miles (42 and 68 kilometers) above the surface of the gas giant suggest the water activity value to sit at 0.585, just above the survivable threshold. Temperatures in this region are also just about survivable, at around minus 40 degrees F. High levels of ultraviolet radiation or lack of nutrients could, however, prevent that potential life from thriving, the researchers said, and completely new measurements would be needed to find whether it actually could be there or not.

Sam Altman has a new startup that intends to give a special type of cryptocurrency to every person on earth. But first, it wants to scan everybody's eyeballs. From a report: Altman, the former head of the Silicon Valley business incubator Y Combinator, is one of three founders of the company Worldcoin. Among the many parts of its plan, Worldcoin has designed an orb-shaped device that would scan a person's iris to construct a unique personal identifier. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital arm of Coinbase Global Inc., LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Day One Ventures. It recently raised about $25 million from investors.

Altman, 36, said in an interview that he conceived the idea in late 2019. The intention was to use cryptocurrency to spread money around equitably, inspired by the trendy economic theory known as universal basic income. Altman was the first investor in Worldcoin but said he has no role in day-to-day operations and mainly serves as an adviser to the company when needed. "I've been very interested in things like universal basic income and what's going to happen to global wealth redistribution and how we can do that better," Altman said. "Is there a way we can use technology to do that at global scale?"

New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds. Phys.Org reports: Earth-sized planets may be much more common than previously realized. Astronomers working at NASA Ames Research Center have used the twin telescopes of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, to determine that many planet-hosting stars identified by NASA's TESS exoplanet-hunting mission are actually pairs of starsâ"known as binary starsâ"where the planets orbit one of the stars in the pair. After examining these binary stars, the team has concluded that Earth-sized planets in many two-star systems might be going unnoticed by transit searches like TESS's, which look for changes in the light from a star when a planet passes in front of it. The light from the second star makes it more difficult to detect the changes in the host star's light when the planet transits.

Using the 'Alopeke and Zorro instruments on the Gemini North and South telescopes in Chile and Hawai'i, respectively, the team observed hundreds of nearby stars that TESS had identified as potential exoplanet hosts. They discovered that 73 of these stars are really binary star systems that had appeared as single points of light until observed at higher resolution with Gemini. "With the Gemini Observatory's 8.1-meter telescopes, we obtained extremely high-resolution images of exoplanet host stars and detected stellar companions at very small separations," said Katie Lester of NASA's Ames Research Center, who led this work. Lester's team also studied an additional 18 binary stars previously found among the TESS exoplanet hosts using the NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet and Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI) on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, also a Program of NSF's NOIRLab.

After identifying the binary stars, the team compared the sizes of the detected planets in the binary star systems to those in single-star systems. They realized that the TESS spacecraft found both large and small exoplanets orbiting single stars, but only large planets in binary systems. These results imply that a population of Earth-sized planets could be lurking in binary systems and going undetected using the transit method employed by TESS and many other planet-hunting telescopes. Some scientists had suspected that transit searches might be missing small planets in binary systems, but the new study provides observational support to back it up and shows which sizes of exoplanets are affected. The researchers report their findings in a paper via arXiv.

"China has released landing process footage from its Zhurong rover as well as video and sounds of the vehicle roving on Mars," reports Space News: Footage of the entry, descent and landing shows deployment of a supersonic disk-gap-band parachute, separation of the backshell, followed by powered descent, a hazard-avoidance hover phase, and landing... Video of the descent of the Zhurong rover from its landing platform, including sounds made by the vehicle's egress, was included in the release. The sounds were created by the metal on metal interaction of a rack and pinion system and recorded by Zhurong's climate station, which intends to capture sounds of Martian winds... The 240-kilogram Zhurong rover successfully landed in Utopia Planitia on May 14.

The deployment took place late May 21 Eastern, following a week-long series of checks and analysis of the environment. The six-wheeled, solar-powered Zhurong has since covered 236 meters on the Martian surface. An undated panorama shows Zhurong and tracks leading back to the landing platform, along with surface and horizon features...

The rover is part of the Tianwen-1 mission, China's first independent interplanetary mission. Consisting of an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, Tianwen-1 launched in July 2020. It entered Mars orbit February 10. Zhurong is equipped with six science payloads, including a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy instrument for analysing surface elements and minerals, panoramic and multispectral imagers, a climate station, magnetometer and a ground-penetrating radar. It aims to return data on potential water-ice deposits, weather, topography and geology, complementing science carried out by missions from other space agencies.

The Tianwen-1 orbiter is currently in an 8.2-hour orbit, allowing a pass over Utopia Planitia once per sol to perform a data relay role. Zhurong has a primary mission and design lifetime of 90 sols (92 Earth days). It is currently unknown if Zhurong's mission will be extended beyond this.
Engadget argues that this footage from Mars "is as much about bragging rights as anything. Zhurong is part of China's first truly independent mission to another planet, and the country no doubt wants to highlight its accomplishments in as much detail as possible."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an interesting report from Science Alert: Thunderstorms that roil across the Southern Great Plains of the US are amongst the strongest of such storms on Earth... Their intensity and frequency have been increasing, yet our best climate models still struggle to predict just how and when they'll arise.

To help refine climate models for the Southern Great Plains, paleoclimatologist Christopher Maupin from Texas A&M University and colleagues used oxygen and hydrogen isotopes to track the ferocity of past storms. Water molecules based on elements wielding an additional neutron or two tend to require a little more energy to vaporize, and release more energy as they condense. This leaves a clear signature in the ratios of isotopes separated by rainfall under various conditions. By comparing the results of analyses taken today with historic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes found trapped by stalactites in Texan caves, the researchers developed an accurate picture of weather events in the past...

Using another set of isotopes, this time measuring those of uranium and thorium, the team dated the stalactites and stalagmites to around the last Ice Age, 30-50 thousand years ago. Measuring the shifts in oxygen and hydrogen isotopes down their lengths allowed the researchers to see the storms cycled from weakly to strongly organized, roughly every thousand years. The more strongly organized the complex of storms becomes, the more intense and damaging they are. They discovered these changes in thunderstorm intensities coincided with well-known, abrupt shifts in global climate, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

The researchers also found these intensity increases coincide with a reduction in rain in southwestern US and greater atmospheric upwelling in the Santa Barbara Basin area. They believe the observed pattern suggests an increased frequency or intensity of the giant global atmospheric waves that drive the weather, called Rossby waves, may be providing the extra lift needed to fuel these greater storms. "Modern anthropogenic climate forcing has increasingly favored an amplification of these synoptic factors," the team wrote in their paper.

"This work will help predict trends of storms in the future," explained geoscientist Courtney Schumacher.

The New York Times tells the story of Fayçal Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant who "caused an online uproar" after saying he'd cracked the last two unsolved ciphers of the four attributed to the Zodiac killer in California "and identified him, potentially ending a 50-year-old quest." Maybe because he said he cracked them in just two weeks. Many Zodiac enthusiasts consider the remaining ciphers — Z32 and Z13 — unsolvable because they are too short to determine the encryption key. An untold number of solutions could work, they say, rendering verification nearly impossible.

But Mr. Ziraoui said he had a sudden thought. The code-crackers who had solved the [earlier] 340-character cipher in December had been able to do so by identifying the encryption key, which they had put into the public domain when announcing their breakthrough. What if the killer used that same encryption key for the two remaining ciphers? So he said he applied it to the 32-character cipher, which the killer had included in a letter as the key to the location of a bomb set to go off at a school in the fall of 1970. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. Mr. Ziraoui said he then worked through a half-dozen steps including letter-to-number substitutions, identifying coordinates in numbers and using a code-breaking program he created to crunch jumbles of letters into coherent words...

After two weeks of intense code-cracking, he deciphered the sentence, "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." The message referred to coordinates based on the earth's magnetic field, not the more familiar geographic coordinates. The sequence zeroed in on a location near a school in South Lake Tahoe, a city in California referred to in another postcard believed to have been sent by the Zodiac killer in 1971.

An excited Mr. Ziraoui said he immediately turned to Z13, which supposedly revealed the killer's name, using the same encryption key and various cipher-cracking techniques. [The mostly un-coded letter includes a sentence which says "My name is _____," followed by a 13-character cipher.] After about an hour, Mr. Ziraoui said he came up with "KAYR," which he realized resembled the last name of Lawrence Kaye, a salesman and career criminal living in South Lake Tahoe who had been a suspect in the case. Mr. Kaye, who also used the pseudonym Kane, died in 2010.

The typo was similar to ones found in previous ciphers, he noticed, likely errors made by the killer when encoding the message. The result that was so close to Mr. Kaye's name and the South Lake Tahoe location were too much to be a coincidence, he thought. Mr. Kaye had been the subject of a report by Harvey Hines, a now-deceased police detective, who was convinced he was the Zodiac killer but was unable to convince his superiors. Around 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, an exhausted but elated Mr. Ziraoui posted a message entitled "Z13 — My Name is KAYE" on a 50,000-member Reddit forum dedicated to the Zodiac Killer.

The message was deleted within 30 minutes.

"Sorry, I've removed this one as part of a sort of general policy against Z13 solution posts," the forum's moderator wrote, arguing that the cipher was too short to be solvable.