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The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is touting several improvements in its already industry-leading forecast model. (credit: ECMWF)

The European forecast model already outperforms all of the world’s other global forecasting systems, including the North American GFS model. The most overt demonstration of the European model’s superiority came in the week before Hurricane Sandy’s devastating landfall in 2012. Out of more than a dozen computer forecasts, only it showed the storm veering along a path toward the East Coast of the United States instead of staying harmlessly out to sea.

Now the world’s best forecast model is getting better, and not just by a little bit. An upgrade that went live this week provides dramatic improvements to the resolution of the model, both for its deterministic forecast as well as the ensemble model runs that are used for forecasting conditions a week or more in the future. “What the European modeling community is doing is just amazing,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell, told Ars. “This is the golden age of weather forecasters. It’s an absolute wonder of computer modeling technology.”

Maue lives and breathes computer forecast models every day when he converts the raw output from global forecasting entities, including the meteorological agencies of Europe, Canada, Japan, China, Brazil, and the United States, into graphics that depict weather conditions around the world. Many of the weather maps shared on social media sites bear the Weather Bell imprint.

(credit: cristian)

When it comes to cholesterol, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

High-density lipoprotein (HDL), the molecular packages that scavenge excess amounts of cholesterol from around the body and ferry it to the liver where it gets broken down, has long been considered “good” cholesterol. That’s in contrast to the “bad” low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol packages that deliver the waxy substance throughout the body where it’s used for the production of cellular products, such as membranes and hormones. Too much LDL—or not enough HDL—and cholesterol can end up getting stockpiled along blood vessels, which hampers blood flow and leads to coronary heart disease.

Thus, heart disease prevention efforts have largely revolved around lowering LDL and raising HDL. However, clinical trials and animal experiments that raise HDL levels have produced mixed results. And in a new study, researchers find that having naturally high levels of HDL can actually be bad.

Can you turn a Dyson vacuum cleaner into an improvised threat to US troops? DARPA may pay you to find out. (credit: Bethesda Softworks)

In an effort to understand the kinds of improvised weapons, devices, and systems that could be used against US forces in the field today, the Defense Research Projects Agency's Defense Science Office is preparing for an alternative sort of "improv" performance. DARPA is inviting researchers, developers, and hardware-hacking hobbyists to join in, and the goal of the planned jam session is to discover ways that off-the-shelf commercial technology could be modified to be used against the military by its adversaries.

The US military has dealt with a wide range of improvised weapons and tools in the hands of adversaries over the past decade, including cell phone activated improvised explosives, off-the-shelf software used to intercept drone video feeds, and USB drives laden with malware that ran rampant on computer networks in Afghanistan. Today there's growing concern about how commercial and consumer drone and robotics technology, Internet-of-Things devices, and other burgeoning technology could be used to spy on, harass, impede, or even kill members of the military.

IEDs made from artillery shells captured in Baghdad are the last generation of improvised threats. DARPA wants to know what the next is. (credit: US Army)

So today, DARPA officially unveiled Improv—a program that will fund "innovative research proposals for prototype products and systems that have the potential to threaten current military operations, equipment, or personnel and are assembled primarily from commercially available technology," according to the announcement.

(credit: flickr user: 0Four)

Approaches from a number of behavioral sciences can be used to understand human honesty. They’re not bothered with making particular judgements about whether a behavior is good or bad, but rather these approaches focus on understanding why people behave honestly or dishonestly in different situations.

Two economists at the University of Nottingham, Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz, have published an intriguing suggestion about the roots of dishonesty: they suggest that a corrupt social environment, rife with political corruption and tax evasion, can trickle down to the individual level and make people in such a country more likely to be dishonest in some contexts. Based on data gathering and behavioral experiments done in 23 countries, they found that people in more corrupt countries were more likely to cheat during an experiment.

The question was why—do national tendencies push the population toward more or less honesty, or do individuals drive the national tendency?

Rice paddies near Bandung, Indonesia. (credit: Onny Carr)

The rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been unrelenting over the past century. But that isn’t the only greenhouse gas humans are adding to the atmosphere, and other have different stories to tell. Methane levels, for example, actually flattened out in the late 1990s, holding pretty steady until continuing an upward climb in 2006. Why, you ask? Well, you aren’t the only one.

(credit: Ed Dlugokencky, NOAA/ESRL)

Methane is a little harder to get a handle on than CO₂, partly because human emissions from things like livestock, rice growing, and landfills are a little harder to track. It's also partly because the natural terms in the global equation are large and erratic. In wetlands, where water-logged, oxygen-poor sediments host methane-exhaling microbes, the amount of methane released varies strongly between wet or dry years. And then there’s the long-term warming of the Arctic, where thawing permafrost can constitute an additional methane source to account for.

Researchers try to determine trends in methane contributions in several ways. You can do your best to monitor individual processes and add up all your estimates. Or, flipping that around, you can interrogate atmospheric measurements to figure out which processes could be responsible for changes. As it happens, methane molecules come with labels that make that easier—different types of methane sources impart different isotopic fingerprints on the carbon in CH₄.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the trapped Michelle with just the right combination of incredibly suspicious, scared, and dangerous. (credit: 10 Cloverfield Lane)

Full of great acting, chills, and dark humor, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a fun confection of an action thriller—but it has nothing to do with the giant monster rampage movie Cloverfield. If you think that's a spoiler, then you've been suckered by a shamefully misleading marketing campaign.

10 Cloverfield Lane producer JJ Abrams has teased this flick by calling it a "blood relative" of Cloverfield. Ad campaigns have suggested it's a sequel or maybe set in the same universe. And if you really squint or bend your mind into pretzels, 10 Cloverfield Lane could be connected to Cloverfield. I mean, it's set on the same planet. It's a scary movie with speculative elements. But by that logic, Fringe is a Cloverfield TV series and Godzilla is a Cloverfield sequel.

The fact is, if this movie had been called 10 Cowabunga Lane, nobody would have wondered, "Wait, is this related to Cloverfield?" And while some will undoubtedly find a way to argue that 10 Cloverfield Lane could in fact be a sequel... c'mon. Occam's Razor, people. This is a movie that got shaped by an ad campaign. Even Abrams has admitted that the Cloverfield tie-in idea struck them about halfway through pre-production on a movie that was supposed to be called The Cellar.