March 1, 2024: We're covering a magnetic monopole, the Mars Sample Return mission's woes, and the largest fire in Texas history. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | The Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas has become the largest in the state's history, scorching more than one million acres of the Texas panhandle since the first flames appeared on Monday. Winter might not seem like prime fire season. And the period from mid-February into April is called the "dormant" fire season, whereas the summer fire season is termed the "growing" season, reports Scientific American's Andrea Thompson. However, wildfires in this region are fairly typical for this time of year, says Heather Gonzales, a wildfire prevention program specialist at the Texas A&M Forest Service.
Why now?: Hard winter freezes can effectively "cure" the grasses that cover much of the panhandle, making them act as fire fuel, Gonzales says. These grasses "almost need constant precipitation to have any moisture in them," she adds. And drier grasses burn more readily and intensely. A strong growing season brought on by wetter than usual weather led this year to an above-normal "fuel loading" of grasses.
What's next: Studies have shown that this region and many others in the U.S. are likely to experience more and bigger wildfires as global temperatures continue to rise with the unabated emissions of greenhouse gases. John Abatzoglou, a complex-systems management researcher, says there is a clear increase in the worst fire weather days during which all the ingredients are in place, just waiting for a spark.
| | | A fire truck driving towards the Smokehouse Creek fire at the Texas panhandle region in Texas, United States on February 29, 2024. The US state of Texas issued a disaster declaration as massive wildfires continued to burn out of control, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate their homes. Credit: Greenville Firefighter Association/ Handout /Anadolu via Getty Images | | | Magnets invariably exhibit paired regions of opposite polarity, but physicists have long searched for "monopole" exceptions—single particles that act like magnets with an isolated north or south pole. Individual polar loners have remained elusive, so researchers have also started looking for bigger systems that collectively behave like those single magnetic charges. For the first time scientists have directly observed this phenomenon, in the spins of electrons on a freckle-sized sample of the mineral hematite, reports freelance science journalist Zack Savitsky. Using a new sensing technique, the researchers observed the electrons' fields forming whirlpool shapes that behaved like magnetic monopoles.
How it works: Electrons in solid materials act like tiny bar magnets; the strength and orientation of their magnetic fields are defined by a quantum property called spin. Working in concert, the spins of many neighboring electrons can form particular patterns that appear as isolated regions of positive or negative magnetic charge.
Why this matters: The search for loner magnet poles that are fundamentally separated lives on. But researchers hope the newly reported "pirouetting electron spins" could one day be used to encode, transfer and store information in computers more efficiently than current methods, Savitsky writes.
| | | • Artists are slipping anti-AI "poison" into their art. Here's how it works. | 5 min read | | | • A stalemate in U.S. Congress recently led NASA to throttle spending, a move that led to rapid, significant layoffs at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lead facility for the federal agency's proposed Mars Sample Return mission. The high-risk mission, which would ferry to Earth samples of Mars rocks and soil collected by NASA's Perseverance Rover, had been beset by mismanagement and rising costs. Nonetheless, the project is still worth pursuing, writes Casey Dreier, senior space policy adviser for The Planetary Society. | 6 min read | | | ICYMI (Our most-read stories of the week) | | | • Is marijuana bad for health? Here's what we know so far. | 3 min read | • Why writing by hand is better for memory and learning. | 5 read | • How did an aquarium stingray get pregnant without a mate? | 3 min read | | | My running group in the Bronx might be among the most racially and ethnically diverse in the U.S. But it's less diverse in terms of the career pursuits of our runners, likely because our neighborhood is dense with medical centers and is home to the Einstein College of Medicine. A significant number of our runners work in health care and/or attend Einstein. Some members of the club were abuzz this week following news that a $1 billion gift will make the private school tuition-free for all students going forward. At least three other U.S. medical schools reportedly also waive tuition for students these days: New York University Grossman School of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, and Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. What a mouthful all those names are. Not so for the Einstein medical school going forward. Ruth Gottesman, the former Einstein professor and current trustee who made the gift, reportedly gave the money on the condition that the medical school not change its name. At age 74, Albert Einstein agreed to have the school, which opened to students in 1955, named for him. Let's hope the reduced debt burden on a growing number of physicians will pave the way for more to work in underserved and understaffed areas and specialties. | —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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