January 2, 2024: What it's like inside a snowstorm cloud, ping-pong balls make effective sound dampeners and humans are just bags inside other bags inside other bags. Plus, the editors round-up some of the best, weirdest and most exciting science news of 2023. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | NASA is running a massive project to analyze snow formation inside clouds. A team of 300 scientists, meteorologists and aircraft crew members spent three years taking radar and lidar (a type of laser scanning) measurements of ice particles, water droplets and temperatures inside clouds. The analysis of that data should help atmospheric scientists better predict where and when snowstorms will hit.
Why this matters: Predicting where snowstorms will drop the most snow remains a difficult task. How snow forms inside a cloud is complicated and real-time analysis is difficult. Future analyses of the NASA data could show how the structure of snow clouds changes over time, and therefore when storms might form.
What the experts say: Simply identifying which physical processes are at play in a looming storm can help forecasters make better predictions, says Brian Colle, a Stony Brook University atmospheric scientist who worked on the new monitoring program. | | | Acoustics researchers used ping-pong balls to create a new kind of sound-reducing material. By drilling five holes each into ping-pong balls and adjusting the holes' positions and sizes, they devised an arrangement of 90 balls–fixed to a piece of plexiglass–that reduces sounds heard on the other side of the surface by 50 percent.
Why this matters: Low-frequency sounds like traffic and construction pass easily through walls and building materials. Constant noise can contribute to health effects over time. While specialized materials can reduce sounds, they're expensive.
What the experts say: "The design gives excellent sound attenuation, even below 500 hertz" (the range most associated with long-term health effects), says Olga Umnova, an acoustics researcher at the University of Salford in England. The next step is to determine whether the ping-pong wall works as well as commonly used materials in the real-world. | | | • Sometimes We Can Have Nice Things: Our 10 Favorite Feel-Good Stories of 2023 | 3 min read | | | • Watch the Best Scientific American TikToks of 2023 (Yes, we're on TikTok! Follow us so you don't miss what's coming this month) | 1 min read | | | • Octopuses are colorblind, but they've developed unique visual systems to see the underwater world. | 5 min read | | | • Starting in spring, New York City's transit agency will charge motor vehicles as much as $36 to enter midtown or lower Manhattan in the nation's first use of congestion pricing. | 6 min read | | | • The human body is really just a large system of bags in bags, "with the added bonus of thumbs and anxiety," writes Bethany Brookshire, science journalist and author of the book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. Inside the skin, which is a bag, are bags containing the heart, the brain, cells (which are themselves bags). "It's just bags all the way down," she says. | 5 min read | | | • More in opinion: The editors of Scientific American round-up our favorite op-eds of 2023 | 5 min read | | | Welcome to 2024! Today in Science was off last week, but the editors spent that time reflecting on all the developments in science that we were privileged to cover in 2023, so I hope you enjoy the round-ups above. | I'm excited to embark on a new year of science discovery with YOU, my awesome readers. Take a few minutes and let me know what you think this newsletter should cover in 2024 by emailing newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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