Author: Jen Pinkowski

Most of the exciting weather that blows across the United States unfolds east of the Rocky Mountains. The West Coast has a reputation for relatively boring, stable weather compared to the endless torrents out east, but every once in a while they’ll get a storm that tears into the coast as hard as a hurricane. This week, the Pacific Northwest will deal with two such storms slamming into the coast, one after the other. The first storm caused some bad weather on Thursday night and this morning, while the second storm is expected to strike tomorrow, Saturday, October 15, with even more ferocity than the one before it.

The story of these two storms is that they’re roughly equivalent to category 1 hurricanes hitting the Pacific Northwest in rapid succession. We spend days and sometimes weeks focusing on much lesser storms spinning around in the Atlantic Ocean, yet large, damaging low-pressure centers swirling on the other side of the country get only a fraction of the attention. Each storm will have similar effects to a hurricane—damaging winds, heavy rain, coastal flooding, and rough seas—and even though neither storm is a hurricane by definition, they should be treated just as seriously.

The first storm approached the Northwest coast on Thursday night and Friday morning, focusing the brunt of its foul weather on Oregon and Washington to end the workweek. The National Weather Service office in Portland, Oregon, collected widespread reports of 55 to 65 mph wind gusts across western Oregon, which is enough to do some damage to trees and power lines. Some of the gusts were even higher—an elevated weather station near the coast in Oceanside, Oregon, measured a wind gust of 103 mph on Thursday night. A few of the thunderstorms in Oregon even spawned tornadoes, one of which hit a small town about 60 miles west of Portland on Friday morning.

If that wasn’t bad enough, another storm is on its way this weekend that looks like it will be even stronger than the first one. This Saturday’s storm, though not an actual hurricane, does have its roots in the tropics. The impending system will gather some of its strength by incorporating the remnants of Super Typhoon Songda, a tropical cyclone that had 150 mph winds out in the western Pacific Ocean earlier this week. As the storm traveled into the higher latitudes, it lost its tropical characteristics and hitched a ride in the jet stream, speeding east across the entire ocean in just a couple of days. The storm will also have ample moisture to work with due to an atmospheric river, or a stream of deep moisture that flows north from the tropics.

As we saw with the storm on Thursday and Friday, strong winds will be the greatest threat this weekend. High wind watches are in effect for coastal and inland areas of northwestern California all the way to the Canadian border in Washington in anticipation of winds that approach hurricane force during the day on Saturday. This includes the cities and suburbs of Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. Widespread wind gusts of 60 to 70 mph will knock down trees, sever power lines, and possibly cause damage to buildings. The wind might have an easier time tearing down trees because the soil is wet and many trees still have their leaves, which creates a sort of parachute effect, catching the wind and putting even greater stress on the trees.

Several inches of rain are possible ahead of the system, with higher totals falling in higher elevations. Forecasters don’t expect widespread flooding to be an issue, but some minor flooding is possible as a result of freshly downed leaves clogging up sewage systems and small creeks.

The culprit behind the two hurricane-strength storms is an intense jet stream dipping over the northwestern United States. Winds in the jet stream are screaming along at nearly 200 mph, which creates intense lifting motion through the atmosphere around the jet stream. Air rapidly rises from the lower levels of the atmosphere as a result of this lift, creating a center of low pressure at the surface. The strength of this particular jet stream will allow the low-pressure systems to grow unusually strong, which is why both systems have and will produce such strong winds.

The Pacific Northwest has an ugly history with damaging windstorms. Storms with this intensity occur every couple of years, and the storm forecast to blow ashore this weekend could produce wind gusts on par with some memorable storms in recent years, including storms in December 2006 and December 1995.

Seen close-up and head-on, an illusion knit wall hanging might look like a mundane collection of stripes gently snagged by cat claws. But step a few paces to one side, and an image emerges. It can be simple: a checkerboard or a snail spiral. Or it can be complicated: a landscape view of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, or Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Whatever the image, the subtle trick on your eye that allows you to finally see this “illusion” isn’t much of a trick at all. It’s just knitting.

Knitting works like this: You build up a swatch of it by forming a row of yarn loops on a knitting needle, then pulling more loops through them, one by one, with a second needle. Each loop shows its rounded top on one side of your swatch, and its beginning-and-end-strand bottom on the other. A whole row of those rounded tops makes a puffy ridge; that’s called a garter-stitch row. A whole line of those bottoms lies flat; that’s called a stocking-stitch row. So, even though that seemingly cat-scratched wall hanging looks as planar as paper, because of those garter- and stocking-stitch rows, its surface is actually 3D. That’s how you create illusion knitting.

As far as anyone knows, illusion knitting originated with a Japanese knitting teacher named Mieko Yano. In the early 1980s, she moved to Sweden to get married; packed along with all her earthly possessions was a slim booklet that explained how to make what she called “magic patterns.” At some point, the booklet was translated into Danish, which is how it came to the attention of another knitting teacher named Vivian Høxbro, who went on to publish her own book about the technique, which she called Shadow Knitting. Her designs were simple, but a slew of people have been experimenting with the parameters of illusion (or shadow) knitting ever since.

The simplest kind of illusion knitting uses one color of yarn. From the front, you see a swath of, say, green. From the side, you see an alternating checkerboard of green squares. Or take the knit below, which appears to be a multicolored grid straight-on but from an angle reveals circles within the grid. 

How does illusion knitting show you two different images? From the side, unlike from the front, your eye catches on the raised garter-stitch ridges that delineate the pattern, and it glosses over the stocking-stitch valleys. Helping this along, a rough surface—the raised garter-stitch ridge, in this case—“tends to look darker than a smooth surface,” according to Derin Sherman, a physics professor at Cornell College in Iowa who studies optical illusions, among other topics. Sherman tells mental_floss, “That’s because, while light often gets caught in the nooks and crannies of a rough surface, it just bounces off a smooth surface”—our flat, stocking-stitch valley.

The kind of illusion knitting that gets you to Marilyn uses two colors of yarn: one light, one dark, in alternating stripes. The most basic explanation of how this works is that the light-colored yarn accentuates stocking-stitch valleys, pushing them into the background; the dark-colored yarn accentuates garter-stitch ridges, pulling them into the foreground. 

Sherman says a good way to visualize how to create this effect is to imagine strips of clay, both dark and light, laid out on a table. “Where you want the picture to look dark, raise the dark clay stripe to create a small dark hill, and lower the white stripe to create a small light valley,” he advises. “Looking straight down shows dark and white stripes, but from the sides the hills stand out, so the patterns appear.” This bit of technique alone isn’t quite enough to make Marilyn pop out of some yarn, but it more than gets you started.

British math teacher Steve Plummer—who uses knitting and crochet to explain math concepts—creates complex images, including Charlie Chaplin in the style of Warhol, a tiger head, Rossetti’s Sybilla Palmifera, and a 3D fractal Menger sponge, seen below. (All of the animations in this story come from Woolly Thoughts, the website of Plummer and fellow math teacher/knitter Pat Ashforth.)

The knitting itself isn’t complicated; even beginner knitters can do it. But any pattern first has to be made into a chart. That’s where the challenge lies. Plummer explains to mental_floss, “The smallest detail I want to show must be at least one stitch across. This determines the scale of the completed piece.” Once he’s figured that out, Plummer places a grid over his entire drawn image. “Each square on the grid represents one stitch, and each row of squares represents one row of knitting,” he says. He then decides which areas on the image will be dark or light, and colors the grid in accordingly. On average, it takes him 100 hours to chart one piece of illusion knitting.

To date, the most impressive use of illusion knitting might be by Austrian artist Tanja Boukal, who’s exhibited strikingly realistic portraits based on gritty newspaper photos of armed women prepared for combat. Is this as far as illusion knitting can go?

Sherman, who is not a knitter himself, sees the potential for more. He suggests the underlying formula could be enhanced by using different colors to shade ridges on either of their sides, so you’d see different images depending on whether you viewed the work from the left or right. But, he admits, “It would be hard for a human to knit.”

Knitted gauntlet thrown?

All animations courtesy of Steve Plummer and Pat Ashforth

The human body is an amazing thing. For each one of us, it’s the most intimate object we know. And yet most of us don’t know enough about it: its features, functions, quirks, and mysteries. That’s why we’re launching a new series called The Body, which will explore human anatomy, part by part. Think of it as a mini digital encyclopedia with a dose of wow.
 

Your nose is more than just a bump on your face—it’s an important part of the respiratory system and affects many other senses, including your taste and hearing. For being something that’s so central to our daily interactions with the world, there’s still a surprising amount to discover about the nose. Here’s a bit of what we do know. 

1. SCENT DETECTIVE: WHAT THE NOSE KNOWS

Although the human nose is weak compared to canine sniffers, our noses can detect 1 trillion smells. Strangely, scientists still aren’t sure exactly how we smell. For decades, researchers thought the olfactory system worked through receptor binding, meaning molecules of different shapes and sizes bonded to specific parts of the nose like puzzle pieces, triggering smell recognition in the brain. But recently, Luca Turin, a biophysicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics Ulm University, has proposed the nose detects smell through quantum vibrations. Turin suggests the frequency at which different molecules vibrate helps the nose identify them as different scents. The theory could explain why molecules of the same shape smell quite differently. Intriguing as it is, this new theory hasn’t been tested enough to be universally accepted.

2. EVOLUTION: JUST HOW DID WE GROW HONKERS, ANYWAY?

As anyone who’s been to a zoo probably knows, great apes (the closest human ancestors) have flat nasal openings—and researchers found that type of nose is far more effective at inhaling air than the human version. So what’s up with ours? Scientists think the shape might be a by-product of our big brain. The growing cerebellum forced human faces to become smaller, which probably affected the nose as well.

3. SUPER SNIFFERS: WHEN A ROSE DOESN’T SMELL AS SWEET

In the battle of the sexes, women’s noses come out on top. When tested for odor detection and identification, women score consistently higher than men. This might have something to do with the size of their olfactory bulb, a structure in the brain that helps humans identify smells. One study found that women have, on average, 43 percent more cells in their olfactory bulb than men do—meaning they can smell more smells.

4. EATING WITH YOUR NOSE: THE ROLE OF SCENT IN FOOD

Think you like chocolate just because it tastes good? Think again. Smell is responsible for 75 to 95 percent of flavor, which explains why plugging your nose helps you swallow something unappetizing. More recently, chefs and neurologists have teamed up to create meals for cancer patients and others with a diminished sense of smell, such as the elderly. Cooking meals tailored to the smell-less could help stave off depression and improve the appetite without over-relying on sugar and salt.

5. REBUILDING A FACE: WHEN ONE NOSE IS NOT ENOUGH

 
When people have cancer or are in an accident, the nose can become infected or even be completely destroyed. But fear not. Plastic surgeons have a nifty way to regrow your nose—on your forehead. Using cartilage from the ribs and tissue expanders that allow the skin to stretch and grow, a new nose can be formed to replace the old one. And while a nose growing out of your forehead looks odd, it’s actually one of the best places for a new nose to grow. The forehead’s blood vessels can be harnessed to help grow the tissue, and removing the new nose only leaves a small scar. Doctors have performed the procedure in the U.S., China, and India.

6. SOMATOSENSORY: NOT ALL SMELLS ARE SMELLS

The nose doesn’t just translate odors in the nasal passage—the tip is also full of nerves that detect pain and temperature. This helps us “smell” non-odor smells. Even people who can no longer smell things with their olfactory system can detect substances like menthol, the minty compound that makes your skin tingle. (Unfortunately, they can’t detect pure scents like vanilla.)

7. THE BODY’S AIR FILTER: MORE THAN JUST A SNIFF MACHINE

The average adult breathes around 20,000 liters of air every day, which keeps the nose quite busy. As the first line of defense for the lungs, the nose filters out small particles like pollen and dust. It also adds moisture to the air and warms it so the lungs are saved from any irritation.

8. SMELL DISORDERS: AN ODORLESS WORLD

There are plenty of things that can go wrong in your nose. Allergic rhinitis, sinus infections, and broken noses are just a few. But perhaps less well known are disorders that affect the nose’s ability to smell. Anosmia is the complete inability to detect odors and can be caused by illness, aging, radiation, chemical exposure, or even genetics. Equally bizarre are parosmia and phantosmia: The former changes your perception of smells, and the latter creates the perception of smells that don’t exist. Luckily, only 1 or 2 percent of North Americans suffer from any smell disorders.

The eye of powerful Hurricane Matthew is just a few dozen miles off the eastern coast of Florida this afternoon, Friday, October 7. The storm’s strong winds and flooding have caused damage up and down the Florida coast over the past 24 hours, and the storm is far from over. The absolute worst-case scenario didn’t play out, thankfully, but there’s still the chance for potentially deadly impacts from this storm as it continues to affect Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

As of 2 p.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center found that Hurricane Matthew was still a major hurricane—though downgraded from category 4 to category 3—with sustained winds of 115 mph in the storm’s eyewall. The hurricane is steadily moving north-northwest, a forward motion that’s brought it parallel to the Florida coast but kept the eyewall just a dozen or so miles east of land. As the storm continues moving generally northward and encounters a southeastern coast that curves northeast, forecasters expect the strongest part of the storm to draw closer to shore. The coasts of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina are particularly vulnerable over the next 36 hours.

 
Powerful winds are likely along the southeast coast as the center approaches the area on Friday night and through the day on Saturday. Hurricane force winds (74 mph or greater) are possible from Jacksonville, Florida, up to Wilmington, North Carolina. Tropical storm force winds are possible across inland counties and as far north as the border between North Carolina and Virginia. Even small flying debris could seriously injure you, so please stay inside during the peak of the storm if you live in this area.

This region of the country is extremely vulnerable to a storm surge, the sea water pushed inland by strong winds. Current forecasts call for a potential storm surge of 6 to 9 feet as far north as Edisto Beach, South Carolina, an area that includes St. Augustine and Jacksonville in Florida, Brunswick and Savannah in Georgia, and Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. Storm surge flooding has already caused damage throughout eastern Florida, with several harrowing videos surfacing on social media showing floodwaters approaching occupied buildings.

 
Not only will the wind and sea cause damage, but flooding from heavy rain is particularly concerning with this storm. Matthew could produce more than a foot of rain along coastal areas of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, with half a foot of rain or more possible along the eastern halves of these three states. This much heavy rain in such a short period of time will likely lead to widespread flash flooding, especially since parts of eastern North Carolina are already swamped from recent rains. The excess water will quickly overwhelm local waterways, and roads in flood-prone areas will submerge with relative ease. Make sure you know alternate ways to get where you need to go this weekend if you can’t just stay home altogether.

Meteorologists used some of the strongest language possible in the statements they issued ahead of Hurricane Matthew. We knew that the eye of the storm would come very close to shore in Florida, and all evidence suggested that the eye would come close enough that its powerful eyewall would drag along the shoreline. The eye stayed just far enough to the east that most of the coast missed the worst winds, but the difference was just one or two dozen miles in most spots.

Forecasters will undoubtedly receive strong criticism for sounding “alarmist” in the lead-up to this hurricane, but the enhanced warnings were absolutely warranted. Had the hurricane wobbled just a dozen miles to the west, the situation in Florida would be much bleaker than it is now. Think of it this way: When the forest is on fire, you don’t stop to yell at the firefighters because your neighborhood didn’t burn down like they said it would. If there has ever been a storm to go all-out on warning people of the potential hazards using the strongest terms possible, it was Hurricane Matthew.

 
Look up tonight, October 7, and you might notice the sky filled with shooting stars—or you might not notice anything at all. Them’s the breaks with the Draconids meteor shower, which peaks tonight after sunset, washed out slightly by a waxing crescent moon.

It wasn’t always that way. In 1933, the shower was alarmingly powerful, with meteors falling “as thickly as the flakes of snow in a snow storm,” and counts reported from around the world reaching 100 to 480 per minute.

Things have died down a bit since then as the Earth has crossed into less-dense fields of debris from comet Giacobini-Zinner, the source of the Draconids. Under good conditions, you might see 10 or so meteors per hour. Not exactly a “snow storm,” but if you catch 10 good meteors—dust- and sand-sized particles from the comet’s debris field smashing into our atmosphere and burning away—it should be well worth the wait.

You may not be familiar with Giacobini-Zinner, a lump of ice, dirt, and rock sailing through the solar system, but it means much more to humankind than the annual October meteor shower it gives us.

Giacobini-Zinner is the first cometary tail through which planetary scientists and engineers ever flew a spacecraft. This feat was the result of opportunity, creativity, trajectory witchcraft, and a willingness to act first and ask permission later.

What happened was this. Launched in 1978, the International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft was designed to measure space weather. It was sent to the “L1 point” between the Sun and the Earth—a point exactly between the Earth and the Sun at which the two bodies have their gravitational pulls nullified and an object can thus be suspended. An object at that point thus has an orbital period identical to that of Earth. ISEE-3 was, in a sense, a space buoy whose scientific payload was chosen to measure space weather and the interactions of solar winds and the Earth’s magnetosphere.

After completion of its mission in 1982, scientists and engineers proposed doing the same thing for solar winds and a cometary atmosphere. The spacecraft was not designed for this, and the maneuvers required to target and cross through a comet’s plasma tail were a shade shy of impossible. Here is what the maneuvers required to complete this mission looked like:

 
Spaceflight isn’t generally like something you might see on Star Trek. Intercept courses are almost never a straight line. You don’t say, “Let’s go to comet Giacobini-Zinner,” fire thrusters, and move from point A to point B. Instead, the precious little fuel carried on these spacecraft, coupled with the physics challenges of gravitational attractions of bodies in space, mean that to reach a destination, you have to use little fuel and catch rides on the gravity of other bodies. These “orbital assists” allow a spacecraft to move along with virtually no fuel expended, while being accelerated simultaneously to ludicrous speeds along some precise, adjusted azimuth. Do this enough times to enough bodies and you can go just about anywhere.

There are maneuvers and there are maneuvers, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Bob Farquhar—the “grandmaster of celestial maneuvers”—could design maneuvers that had spacecraft arrive not only at staggeringly precise points in space, but even plan to have those arrivals take place on some particular day. (He liked to plan trajectories so that major space encounters would be achieved on days such as his wife’s birthday, or his wedding anniversary.) Farquhar was responsible for the ISEE-3 plan. His elaborate maneuvers—none of which the spacecraft was designed to achieve, for a mission it was not designed to accomplish—took the spacecraft through the comet’s plasma tail on September 11, 1985, making it the first spacecraft to ever do such a thing.

Farquhar then upped the ante by sending the spacecraft to comet Halley, which it rendezvoused with in March 1986. ISEE-3 then became the first spacecraft to fly through the tails of two comets. Again, this spacecraft was designed to do neither of these things. The fact that it did both is a testament to Farquhar’s genius.

That’s why Giacobini-Zinner is historically important and its burning-up debris worth consideration tonight, even if the dark sky won’t exactly teem with meteors. The good news is that unlike many meteor showers, you don’t have to stay up until midnight or later to see the main event. The Draconids shower comes alive just after nightfall. If you’re unable to escape the light pollution or just don’t feel like dealing with the mosquitoes, you can also watch a presentation of the meteor shower on Slooh at 8 p.m. EDT, where observatories in the Canary Islands, the UK, and Canada will be watching on your behalf. In addition to live commentary on the history and origin of the meteor shower, astronomers will offer a lesson on astrophotography and explain how you can use your DSLR to take meteor shower photographs of your very own.

 
The Industrial Revolution brought significant development to Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but it also increased the risk of diseases like tuberculosis (TB), which spread like wildfire among people living in close quarters in cities. Without a cure, TB was responsible for nearly one-third of all deaths in Britain in the first half of the 19th century. Now, bioarchaeologists are discovering skeletons that show some people lived a long time before the disease killed them. A new study investigates a skeleton of a young man who had tuberculosis in the early 19th century in Wolverhampton, England—and oddly enough, changes to his spine and ribs suggest he may have worn a corset.

Tuberculosis primarily infects the lungs, but it can spread to bone through the bloodstream. The disease tends to concentrate in the vertebrae of the spine, because these bones are near the lungs, and because the pathogen likes the blood cell–producing tissues there. The infection of the spine often results in a hunchback deformity as the vertebrae collapse, known as Pott’s disease.

Since TB couldn’t be cured and often progressed to deform the spine, men and women both wore corsets as an orthopedic device to correct postural issues. Of course, people also wore corsets for reasons of fashion: Women attempted to slim their waists and emphasize their hips and busts, while aristocratic men used them to show off their broad shoulders and narrow waist.

Writing in the International Journal of Paleopathology, UK bioarchaeologists Joanna Moore and Jo Buckberry lay out the evidence from this skeleton, which was one of 150 burials excavated from St. Peter’s Collegiate Church overflow cemetery in 2001–2002. The cemetery was in use from 1819–1853; they couldn’t pinpoint the time of the man’s death any more precisely. His ribs had a weird angle to them on both sides—the result of something compressing them over time. While the vitamin-D deficiency rickets can cause this, there was no other evidence of that disease in his body. The spinous processes of the man’s thoracic vertebrae—those little poky bits you can feel along the midline of your back between your ribs—were also strangely positioned, angling to the left. Both types of bony deformities are consistent with compression from long-term corset use.

But beyond the compression seen in the ribs and mid-spine, Moore and Buckberry found evidence of a life-threatening disease. All of the vertebrae in the man’s lumbar spine in his lower back had been damaged. The destruction was so immense in the first and second lumbar vertebrae that they collapsed and fused together, creating a significant bend in his lower spine. Similar destruction was present in the lower thoracic spine, where the vertebrae meet with the ribs. These destroyed vertebrae are characteristic of Pott’s disease and are almost certainly the result of tuberculosis.

Moore and Buckberry found historical records from Wolverhampton that note that tuberculosis—also known as consumption, because people literally wasted away from the disease—was a significant factor affecting health and causing death in this area in the early 19th century. The rapid industrialization of the city had led to increased levels of air pollution, which in turn contributed to a rise in lung diseases like TB.

So, this young 19th-century British man had tuberculosis and wore a corset. But the skeleton itself does not reveal whether he was a dandy who contracted tuberculosis or a consumptive who didn’t much care for fashion. The skeletal effects of fashionable garments and medical apparatus in men of the time period would be similar. Of course, as anthropologist Rebecca Gibson of American University, whose research deals with social and biological effects of corseting in European women of the 18th and 19th centuries, told mental_floss, “being a dandy and being a consumptive are not mutually exclusive.” All that said, the link between TB and corsets is well established through both historical records and skeletal remains, so it is at least probable that this Wolverhampton man contracted TB and corrected his spinal issue with a corset.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is that this is actually the first male skeleton ever found to have corset-related changes. Gibson says, “The deformation shown here is consistent with corseting damage seen in female skeletons.” Although historical records clearly mention European men wearing corsets, prior to this study, the only skeletons shown to have corset deformities have been female. This lack of evidence may be related to the diminishing popularity of corseting among men in this time period, or it may be related to a lack of systematic study of male skeletons for corseting practices. Regardless of the reason for it, this new finding shows that bioarchaeologists should consider chucking gendered assumptions when looking at skeletons for corset wearing.

What began as Moore’s student project on a skeleton curated by the Biological Archaeology Research Centre at the University of Bradford may now change the way bioarchaeologists look at the bodies of men from 18th to 19th century Europe. Now that we know that corseting evidence can be found on men’s bodies, more studies of this kind will increase our understanding of both Victorian medical practice and men’s fashion.

For most of September, if you walked outside and didn’t know for a fact that Labor Day had passed and schools had started, you would’ve been forgiven for thinking it was August. September was hot and sticky across much of the United States—to the point where the seemingly endless summer heat is pushing into record territory. In particular, this past September shaped up to be one of the hottest Septembers on record for much of the southern United States.

Normally, September is a transition month in the weather world. The sun slowly begins focusing its intensity on the Southern Hemisphere, leaving behind crisper weather for those of us in the northern half of the world. Cooler temperatures and dropping humidity levels ought to make the second half of September downright refreshing, but the weather this year hasn’t followed the rules.

September 2016 wound up in the record books as the hottest September ever recorded in cities like Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; and Huntsville, Alabama. It was the second-warmest September on record for urban areas like Washington D.C., and Birmingham, Alabama. Even up in Philadelphia and down in usually sultry Baton Rouge, Louisiana, unusually warm temperatures made September 2016 the third-warmest on record.

This is no small feat. All of these cities (except for Washington) have temperature records at their major airports that stretch back generations. If your parents and grandparents lived in Greensboro or Birmingham when they were growing up, they probably never experienced a lead-up to fall as warm as what we just went through.

Even as a cold front came through to welcome the end of the month, this past September still managed to place high in the record books. The science is clear: Observational data on climate change [PDF] show that heat waves have already increased in duration and intensity. Chilly fall mornings may become less and less frequent. Sweating it out in September may be the new normal.

 
The culprit behind the delayed cooldown was a near-persistent ridge of high pressure that has made itself at home over the region. The jet stream typically shifts to the north and grows less wavy during the summer months, allowing that stale, muggy air to surge north from the Gulf of Mexico and sit over the land like a wet, miserable blanket. The jet stream gets wavier as summer fades to fall because the temperature gradients are more extreme between north and south. The wavy jet stream allows shots of refreshing air to dip southward from Canada, each burst of cool air further eroding the extent of the muggy air until winter sets in.

While daytime high temperatures weren’t as brutal as you would see in July, it was still unusually warm when you take into account the daily average temperature, which is the high temperature and the low temperature averaged together. This measure gives you a good idea of the day as a whole, factoring in both how warm it was during the day and how cool it got during the night. Warm nights make warm days even more intolerable because you get little relief once the Sun goes down, and it also gives you a warmer starting point to begin daytime heating the following day.

If we look at Greensboro, North Carolina, their average daily temperature for most of September should be around 72°F, which would mean they normally see average highs in the 80s and average lows in the 60s. Their average daily temperature this September was 77°F, a full five degrees above normal, indicative of high temperatures around 90°F and low temperatures near 70°F almost every day. It’s a similar story across the rest of the region where records were either broken or came within a whisper of being topped.

 
Even though the most uncomfortable air started to break when the calendar flipped to October, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there are better-than-even chances of above-average temperatures across most of the country through the first half of fall. Of course, “above normal” in the late fall and early winter is all relative, so it won’t be as unbearably warm and muggy as it was for much longer than it should have been.

Starting today, October 1, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center will begin forecasting the effects of solar storms on specific regions of the Earth—areas as small as 350 square miles. The Space Weather Modeling Framework, as it is called, gives NOAA a heads-up of about 45 minutes that a solar storm will affect some specific place on Earth. (For comparison, tornado warnings have windows of up to 15 minutes.) NOAA can then issue calls for regions affected to take evasive actions in order to protect the power grid and other infrastructure from lasting damage.

Such forecasts were long impossible to make, and the new capability is the result of decades of research, modeling, and refinement by scientists at the University of Michigan and Rice University.

WHAT ARE SOLAR STORMS?

Solar storms are the result of powerful eruptions of charged particles and magnetic fields from the Sun. When they strike, they can cause serious problems with the power grid. This happened most recently in 1989, when a solar storm tripped circuit breakers at Hydro-Québec, plunging the city into darkness for nine hours. (The storm also disrupted weather and communications satellites, and sensors on the space shuttle Discovery, which was in orbit at the time.) Regional forecasts of areas that might be affected by such storms has been elusive because of the sheer difficulty of constructing a working model.

The Space Weather Modeling Framework, then, is a quantum leap in predicting the effects and targets of geomagnetic storms. It combines three disparate models: one that looks at “ring currents” of hot particles that encircle Earth; one that concerns the ionosphere (a vast region of the upper atmosphere that leads to the magnetosphere); and one concerning “magnetohydrodynamics,” which, according to University of Michigan press statement, “simulates effects on the Earth from electric and magnetic fields.” It took 25 years to develop and marry the three models.

There is a 12 percent chance that the Earth will be hit by a solar storm in the next decade. What might that mean? Look at what happened in Québec, but if you want to experience some real terror, look also at the Carrington Event of 1859.

All things considered, that was a pretty good time to sustain such a catastrophic solar storm. Electric utilities were still decades away. (Paris, the “city of lights,” wouldn’t get its first outdoor electrical light for another 19 years, and Thomas Edison wouldn’t open his first power utility until 1882—to a whopping 85 homes.) So when the solar storm hit, the “grid” consisted entirely of telegraph lines. The impact varied. On the mild end of the spectrum, telegraph operators lost power and their tap-tap-taptaptap-taps transmitted nothing at all. On the scary end, the massive infusion of bad current into the telegraph lines and set paper on fire in telegraph offices.

Imagine, then, the mass destruction that would result from an event today of the same magnitude. Power lines, cable lines, telephone lines—all would risk such surges of solar strength, possibly leaving major metropolitan areas without electricity, water, or any way of communication. The Earth narrowly avoided just such a catastrophic solar superstorm in 2012.

PREVIOUSLY VAGUE WARNINGS GET SPECIFIC—AND ACTIONABLE

Before the creation of the Space Weather Modeling Framework, forecasters might see a solar flare coming and tell utility companies, This looks big and scary, so be prepared. But nobody really knew how big the storm might be or which areas might be affected. Such vagaries gave utilities few options. Daniel Welling, assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, tells mental_floss that Hydro-Québec had no warning that a solar storm would affect the power grid. “It took only 90 seconds from the point that they noticed a problem to the point where eastern Canada was without power. With our tool,” Welling says, “utility companies can see the magnitude of the event before it hits and what regions are likely to be most affected. They can prepare and take action to prevent another Hydro-Québec incident—or worse.”

Welling is one of the new model’s developers. “I’ve talked to representatives from the power industry,” he says, “and they repeatedly tell us that this information will be both useful and actionable.” For very extreme space weather storms, representatives from the power industry must make a decision to either disable components of the power grid or keep the system up and risk serious damage.

HOW UTILITIES WILL RESPOND TO SCARY FORECASTS

“We’re thrilled” about the new forecasting feature, Howard Singer, chief scientist of the Space Weather Prediction Center, tells mental_floss. “In the past we’ve been able to provide a global index of activity: How likely the geomagnetic field is to be disturbed over the next day or so—hours to days. This [new modeling framework] introduces the beginnings of being able to say it might be more disturbed, say, in Europe or the United States, or reaching down from Canada into the northern U.S. region. It’s beginning to give us some regional capability where these disturbances might be most important in affecting technologies.”

It works like this. The Space Weather Prediction Center uses the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a nonprofit international regulatory authority, to disseminate information to grid operators in the United States and Canada. NOAA will call them if something is imminent, and they will get the word out. In addition, the Space Weather Prediction Center has a number of ways of conveying information to the public, government, and industry, including a website, a subscription service, and phone calls to important customers. “One organization we are involved with is the Department of Homeland Security, and in particular, the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” says Singer.

Words and warnings, of course, must be followed by actions. NERC has an operating procedure that they use for the information they receive. They take actions on long-term things—if an event is likely in couple of days, grid operators might put off maintenance on something that they’re doing somewhere. There are actions they take even one hour or so in advance. They monitor transformer temperatures, and they closely monitor devices more susceptible to solar events. They can shed loads so that the grid in question is not running near capacity. They can remove lines from services that interconnect between various grid operators.

“On one hand,” says Welling, “you are guaranteeing a short-term power outage to a region. On the other hand, you are preventing massive losses and long-term power outages. Making these types of decisions requires accurate and regional knowledge of space weather hazards. Our model results are a big first step toward this.”

Tomorrow, September 30, the European Space Agency will attempt a daunting feat of celestial maneuvering: a controlled landing of the Rosetta spacecraft on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. You can watch mission control. There are two ways: the ESA livestream, from 6:30–7:40 a.m. EDT, or the NASA TV livestream, which starts a little earlier (6:15 a.m. EDT).

While you won’t be able to see live footage of the attempted landing (though images from the descent will be available), you’ll see the scientists at mission control attempting the maneuver—and bringing to a close a mission that was in progress for decades. Beyond the science, it’s bound to be emotional: expect shouts of excitement, hugs, and tears.

Rather than turning the spacecraft into a cannonball and smashing it into the comet, engineers hope to settle it on the surface, where it might sit for eons alongside Philae, its lander—a duo of tiny monuments to human exploration.

Well, maybe. The thing is, we’ll never know Rosetta’s fate.

Rosetta has been in orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko since August 2014. You might recall that three months later, Philae landed on 67P. It bounced (and bounced and bounced), eventually coming to rest at an angle in a shadowy area. That wasn’t an ideal outcome, but Philae defied odds and made contact with Earth. Before the ESA shut it down forever in July 2016, Philae managed to do some great comet science, including the discovery on the comet of prebiotic molecules that are necessary for life.

Meanwhile, Rosetta studied the comet from afar, mapping meticulously its composition, and returning images for scientists to study back home. Among Rosetta’s findings: molecular oxygen, suggesting the comet was first formed far beyond Neptune, and suggesting further that Kuiper Belt objects are not the source of Earth’s water. The very shape of the comet itself was a discovery. 67P looks more like a rubber ducky than the bouncy ball they expected. And just a few weeks ago, Rosetta revealed the location of lost little Philae.

So why attempt to land Rosetta now? Because it’s solar powered, and as 67P travels farther and farther away from the Sun in its orbit, the spacecraft has received less and less sunlight, and thus has diminishing power available for flight or instruments. If it’s going to land, now is the time.

 
What will happen is this: Rosetta will spiral toward the asteroid in a controlled manner—descending at about 50 centimeters per second—taking ever-refined measurements and high-definition images all the way down. (It’s been drawing closer for weeks, performing increasingly tight orbits.) As those measurements and images are captured, they will be sent immediately back to Earth.

At the moment of contact, the spacecraft will be instructed to switch off. That’s kind of disappointing for us Earthbound viewers. But it won’t be an attempt to cut away from a potential crash landing. Rather, the goal is to keep radio signals in space tidy. ESA doesn’t want a spacecraft far out in the solar system blasting radio signals all over the place, because that might interfere with other spacecraft communications. Moreover, even if Rosetta were ordered to transmit until the heat death of the universe, there’s virtually no chance that its antenna would survive the landing and still be properly oriented to beam signals to Earth.

This isn’t the first time a space agency has attempted such a landing. In 2001, NASA landed its NEAR spacecraft on the asteroid Eros—the first time a spacecraft had landed on a small body. It wasn’t a stunt, exactly—the spacecraft was going to hit Eros one way or another—but the mission’s flight director was Bob Farquhar of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who was known in life as the “grandmaster of celestial maneuvers.” (Farquhar died in 2015.) He was famed for his genius at plotting incredibly complex and elaborate trajectories on space missions. He felt like he could nail the landing—and he did. The spacecraft touched down so gently that it remained fully operational for several weeks afterward, allowing scientists to capture data from a wholly unexpected vantage point.

Sadly, we won’t get such satisfaction from Rosetta. Because the spacecraft will shut down before touchdown, its fate on the comet will remain a mystery. Did it land gently? Bounce away? Smash into pieces? We’ll never know—unless some other space mission allows us to peer at 67P in the future.

But while Rosetta flight operations will be at an end, the work will go on. The spacecraft has already returned several years’ worth of data for scientists to organize and study. On the landing approach alone, Rosetta will return an extravaganza of data covering a region of the comet known as Ma’at, characterized by 50-meter-deep pits that are actively blasting dust into space. Those pits feature “goosebump” structures that scientists believe to be “cometesimals”—the objects that came together to form the asteroid at the dawn of the solar system nearly 5 billion years ago. The spacecraft will make contact with surface area that is adjacent to a pit that has been dubbed Deir el-Medina (after a town in Egypt with a pit of similar appearance).

There’s something so audacious and Star Trek–y about this: They found a deep mysterious cavern from the dawn of time, with stardust blasting from it, and now this tiny celestial voyager will peer down into the chasm before alighting on its rim. It’s frontier science. 

During the livestreams from ESA and NASA, scientists and engineers will offer commentary on the mission and its legacy, and explain what is happening with the spacecraft during its final moments in operation. Over the years ahead, as scientists study the data and refine our collective understanding of the solar system, Rosetta and Philae will rest together on the celestial target of the most ambitious mission ever attempted by ESA.

 
Welcome to fall! Cooler temperatures are here. Now for the bad news: We’re in the peak of hurricane season. This dreaded time of the year is also known as Cape Verde season, after the islands where the so-called “hurricane highway” originates. Here are seven facts about this awesome—and sometimes deadly—weather phenomenon.

1. WHERE THE HURRICANE HIGHWAY BEGINS

The Cape Verde Islands, located off the northwest coast of Africa, are where the hurricane highway begins. Thunderstorms destined to become hurricanes often form into a tropical depression near the islands, slowly organizing and strengthening over the following week as the system moves toward the Caribbean. These storms have a long time to get their act together, but they also have to cover a lot of distance without losing their power to reach the East Coast as a hurricane. Some storms are able to thrive with little wind shear, ample warm water, and moist air, while others starve and dissipate if they encounter cooler waters, strong winds, or ingest dry, dusty air blowing off the Sahara Desert.

2. WHY HERE?

It’s hard to imagine from North America that a couple of thunderstorms on another continent thousands of miles away can swirl up into a monstrous storm, but it happens almost every year. The extreme temperature gradient between the blistering heat of the Sahara desert and the more temperate climate of the savanna to its south creates an easterly jet stream that triggers clusters of showers and thunderstorms. These clouds then move from east to west, emerging off the western African coast near the Cape Verde Islands. Every year, the right conditions turn a handful of these localized storms into tropical storms that make their way across the Atlantic.

3. THE BIGGEST HURRICANE ALWAYS STARTS FROM THE SMALLEST THUNDERSTORM.

 
Hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons—these are all actually names for the same force of nature, like the storm that hit the east coast in 1992. Cyclones like Hurricane Andrew don’t just form out of thin air. All tropical cyclones require a relatively tiny “nucleus” of thunderstorms in order to develop. When the air and water temperatures are right, these groups of thunderstorms sometimes spin up into a fierce low-pressure system capable of causing a lot of damage. We see lots of these seedling thunderstorms over the ocean every year, but only a small number of them actually become hurricanes.

4. TROPICAL CYCLONES FORM IN DIFFERENT AREAS IN DIFFERENT MONTHS.

Where a tropical storm or hurricane begins its trip across the ocean depends on what time of the year it forms. Storms that form early in the season usually get their start from thunderstorms or cold fronts that stall over the water very close to land; almost all of the storms that form in the Atlantic in June come to life within a few hundred miles of land. When we reach the peak of hurricane season, though, they start to form farther and farther out in the ocean—all the way out to the shores of Africa.

5. WE’RE IN THE PEAK OF HURRICANE SEASON.

Hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean runs from June 1 through November 30. Storms are most common during that six-month stretch of the year, but sometimes they can form earlier or later too. That said, the period between the middle of August and the middle of October is typically the climatological peak of the season. That’s because as the ocean water gets warmer, the atmosphere becomes conducive to vigorous storms, increasing the risk for hurricanes and tropical storms.

6. CAPE VERDE STORMS CAN EASILY LAND IN THE HISTORY BOOKS …

 
Tropical waves traveling west from the coast of Africa in the middle of the summer are the culprits behind some of the worst hurricanes we’ve experienced in the United States. For example, on August 8, 2005, a small tropical wave emerged off the coast of Africa, soon becoming Tropical Depression 10. That depression would fall apart a few days later, but its remnants kept moving toward the U.S., redeveloping into a new tropical depression over the Bahamas on August 23. That new tropical depression became Hurricane Katrina, the costliest hurricane to ever strike the United States.

It’s a similar story for many—but not all—major hurricanes in recent history. Hurricanes Andrew, Dennis, Ivan, Isabel, and Ike were all Cape Verde–type storms that sprang to life thousands of miles away from where they would ultimately wreak havoc.

7. … BUT NOT ALL DEVASTATING STORMS GIVE US A WEEK TO PREPARE.

While the far eastern part of the Atlantic Ocean is a hotbed of activity this time of the year, it’s not the only place you need to watch if you live near the coast. Storms that form close to land can quickly spin themselves into catastrophe. Hurricane Sandy formed just south of Jamaica and hit New Jersey in a matter of days in 2012. A tropical depression that developed east of Florida on September 18, 2005, exploded into Hurricane Rita just three days later, with 180 mph winds—the most intense storm ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Meteorologists are currently predicting 2 to 4 serious storms this hurricane season. So it may be worth preparing: NOAA suggests gathering a few key disaster supplies to have on hand, getting an insurance check-up, and locating the safest high ground.