In brief: Extreme outbreaks more common

Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - 20:00 StudyHall.Rocks

Will extreme weather become more common?

The spring of 2011 will be remembered in the U.S. and Canada for extreme weather systems responsible for 363 tornadoes. Before it was all over, 350 people were dead and damages totaled $11 billion.

And there could be more events just like it. The average number of tornadoes in such outbreaks has risen since 1954, according to a study by researchers at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. And the chance of outbreaks similar to the 2011 one has also increased.
The study's authors do not know why this is happening, but are trying to determine what in the climate system has caused the increase in outbreak severity. Their research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

SHORT BURSTS: Short bursts of radio waves from a source beyond the Milky Way have been detected by astronomers, according to a McGill University report.
    The bursts “come from an extremely powerful object which occasionally produces multiple bursts in under a minute,” says a news release from the Canadian university.
    Theories about the origin of fast radio bursts focus on cataclysmic events such as a star exploding in a supernova. Traditionally, the bursts have been one-off events, the university report said.
    “The finding suggests that these bursts must have come from a very exotic object, such as a rotating neutron star having unprecedented power that enables the emission of extremely bright pulses,” the news release reports. “It is also possible that the finding represents the first discovery of a sub-class of the cosmic fast-radio-burst population.”

BACK ON THE GROUND: After a year in space, Scott Kelly is back on Earth.
The astronaut, who spent a year at the International Space Station, landed successfully in Kazakhstan March 1, according to NASA. Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko were part of a yearlong experiment aimed at examining the effects of long-term spaceflight on the body.

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