Halloween 2013 brought real terror to an Austin, Texas, neighborhood, when a flash flood killed four residents and damaged roughly 1,200 homes. Following torrential rains, Onion Creek swept over its banks and inundated the surrounding community. At its peak, the rampaging water flowed at twice…
The forests that surround Campos do Jordao are among the foggiest places on Earth. With a canopy shrouded in mist much of time, these are the renowned cloud forests of the Brazilian state of São Paulo. It is here that researchers from the São Paulo…
Last June, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a Climate Action Plan to help predict and address the impacts of climate change. To further this important effort, Microsoft Research is pleased to launch a special Climate Data award program, which offers scientists and decision-makers 12 months…
https://youtu.be/Pwtpseb9fOM Starting in the tenth century, during the Medieval Warm Period, Greenland was a fraction of a degree warmer than today. Norse settlers raised livestock and cultivated small farms. Later, in the fifteenth century, a colder climate and conflicts with the Inuit caused them to…
As I listened to U.S. President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address in January, I was struck by the emphasis he placed on addressing global climate change and the need for clean energy. “The path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult,” the…
Antibiotics, antivirals, NSAIDs—the list of modern “wonder drugs” goes on and on. And yet many diseases remain resistant to drug therapy, and in other instances, the side effects of drug treatment are as bad as or worse than the disorder. Why, the public wonders, aren’t…
When wildfires strike, all eyes turn to the clouds, hoping for a downpour that will quench the flames. Now, wildfire prevention teams on the Greek island of Lesvos are looking to a different kind of cloud for help, thanks to the VENUS-C Fire application and…
Think about supercomputers of the recent past. Just 15 years ago, supercomputers were rare and exotic machines. Government laboratories in the United States and Japan spent hundreds of millions of dollars on custom computing rigs and specialized facilities to house them, in a bid to…
