3 tropical cyclones churn in the South Pacific in unusual occurrence
Three tropical cyclones are spinning in the South Pacific, an occurrence that scientists say is unusual. Tropical cyclones Rae, Seru and Alfred are all churning as the region is in the peak of a season that starts in November and ends in April.
The storms are called cyclones when they happen in the Southwest Pacific and hurricanes when they form in the North Atlantic, but are essentially the same phenomenon.
"It's not incredibly unusual to have three hurricanes simultaneously in the month of September in the North Atlantic," said Brian Tang, an atmospheric science professor at University at Albany. "Certainly it is a very busy period for the South Pacific and three tropical cyclones is a lot to happen at once, but not unprecedented."
The last time three such storms occurred in the South Pacific was January 2021 when Lucas, Ana and Bina were churning simultaneously, though it's not clear if Bina officially reached Category 1 status, Tang said.
Rae formed Friday north of Fiji and brought whipping winds and heavy rain that damaged fruit trees, according to local reports.
Alfred developed in the Coral Sea on Monday and is expected to bring flooding rains to the northeast Australia state of Queensland this weekend.
Seru became a cyclone on Tuesday and is expected to track near the island nation of Vanuatu but remain offshore.
"The atmosphere is chaotic. There's a lot of natural fluctuation in it … we need to be open to the possibility that factors that are beyond our ability to predict might have led to these three cyclones at the same time," said Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
09-06-2025
- Boston Globe
24 universities plan to back Harvard in court battle with Trump administration
In the motion on Monday, the universities say the brief will explain how 'academic research is an interconnected enterprise' and will provide 'a broader perspective of how these devastating consequences will play out.' Advertisement 'The elimination of funding at Harvard negatively impacts the entire ecosystem,' the filing reads. 'The cuts will disrupt ongoing research, ruin experiments and datasets, destroy the careers of aspiring scientists, and deter long-term investments at universities across the country.' Other schools involved in the effort are Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, California Institute of Technology, Colorado State University, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University, University of Oregon, Rice University, Rutgers University, University of Maryland (College Park), and University of Pittsburgh, according to court records. Advertisement A judge granted the Friday motion but had not yet ruled on the Monday filing for the six additional universities as of Monday afternoon. Several of the universities that have signed on to back Harvard in court have also faced funding threats from the Trump administration, which has taken extraordinary moves to overhaul higher education, particularly elite schools. The Trump administration has claimed elite universities pedal leftist ideologies and have failed to address antisemitism on campus since Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Cornell and Columbia are the only Ivy League schools that have not joined as of Monday. Columbia leaders have said they would comply with the administration's demands after officials froze hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, arguing that the school failed to protect Jewish students from discrimination. In April, professors at several This is a developing story and will be updated. Nick Stoico can be reached at
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
State-level AI regulation ban emerging as D.C. flashpoint
BOSTON (SHNS) – Governors and legislatures 'won't be happy' if the federal government bars them from enacting any state-level regulations on artificial intelligence for the next decade, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey said Wednesday while pledging an effort to get the policy rider tossed from a funding bill. The junior senator from Massachusetts convened civil rights activists and academic experts for a virtual event, where they escalated their opposition to a provision in the U.S. House-approved reconciliation package imposing a 10-year moratorium on state AI restrictions. Markey said that when the bill emerges in the U.S. Senate, he will try to have it eliminated 'as a violation of the Senate rules for reconciliation.' 'We have to be clear about the provision: rather than proposing any plan to address the risks of AI, [the bill would] say you can't do anything about it. But governors are not going to be happy with that, state legislatures won't be happy with it, and I think increasingly, Republicans and Democrats are not going to be happy with it,' Markey said Wednesday. Alondra Nelson, a former Biden administration science official who is now a professor at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, argued that governments cannot wait another decade before pursuing limitations on the use of AI and automated decision-making systems. 'AI systems are already, today, reshaping equality and opportunity in real people's lives. We know that IRS algorithms have disproportionately targeted black taxpayers for audits. We know that facial recognition systems are already leading to wrongful arrests. We know already that insurance companies are using surveillance data that creates discriminatory pricing for different Americans. We know that the uses of AI in health care are sometimes missing cancer in darker-skin patients while detecting it in other patients,' Nelson said. 'These aren't hypothetical future risks. They're certainly not risks that we can wait for 10 years to address. These are documented harms that are happening to members of the American public right now.' The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee added the moratorium language to the budget reconciliation bill. At a markup hearing last month, committee chair Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky said the proposal would implement 'guardrails that protect against state-level AI laws that could jeopardize our technological leadership.' However, the proposal has drawn some bipartisan pushback. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said Tuesday she did not know the 10-year AI regulation ban was in the bill when she voted to advance it and is 'adamantly OPPOSED to this.' She added that she would not vote in favor of the finalized bill — which cleared the House by a one-vote margin — if it returns from the Senate still containing the moratorium. Forty attorneys general, both Democrats and Republicans, jointly penned a letter to congressional leaders on May 16 announcing opposition to the provision, warning that its impact 'would be sweeping and wholly destructive of reasonable state efforts to prevent known harms associated with AI.' Attorneys general previously called for federal AI governance to focus on 'high risk' systems with emphasis on transparency, testing and enforcement. Attorney general letter on AI moratoriumDownload 'Rather than follow the recommendation from the bipartisan coalition of State Attorneys General, the amendment added to the reconciliation bill abdicates federal leadership and mandates that all states abandon their leadership in this area as well,' the 40 AGs wrote in the letter circulated by the National Association of Attorneys General. 'This bill does not propose any regulatory scheme to replace or supplement the laws enacted or currently under consideration by the states, leaving Americans entirely unprotected from the potential harms of AI. Moreover, this bill purports to wipe away any state-level frameworks already in place.' Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell was among the letter's signatories. On Beacon Hill, elected officials have been weighing the potential risks of AI against the economic upsides of a fast-growing industry. Lawmakers and Gov. Maura Healey last year included $100 million in an economic development bond bill to create a Massachusetts AI Hub, which Healey's office said would 'facilitate the application of artificial intelligence across the state's ecosystem.' Lawmakers targeted AI in several bills pending this term, proposing new guardrails around its use in health care decision-making, additional consumer protection measures, a study on greenhouse gas emissions from the electrically demanding technology, and more. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Yahoo
Planet Nine? Not quite, but some astronomers think they've spotted a new dwarf planet
A possible new dwarf planet has been discovered at the edge of our solar system, so far-flung that it takes around 25,000 years to complete one orbit around the sun. The object, known as 2017 OF201, was found by researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University who were searching for 'Planet Nine,' a hypothetical planet larger than Earth that is thought to orbit beyond Neptune. Some astronomers theorize that a mysterious ninth planet, which so far remains undetected, could explain an unusual clustering of objects and other anomalies observed in the outer solar system. In searching for the elusive Planet Nine, researchers instead turned up a different resident in our cosmic backyard. 'It's not very different from how Pluto was discovered,' said Sihao Cheng, a member at the Institute for Advanced Study who led the research team. 'This project was really an adventure.' If confirmed, the newfound dwarf planet would be what Cheng calls an 'extreme cousin' of Pluto. The findings were published on the preprint website arXiv and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Cheng and his colleagues estimate that 2017 OF201 measures about 435 miles across — significantly smaller than Pluto, which measures nearly 1,500 miles across. A dwarf planet is classified as a celestial body that orbits the sun that has enough mass and gravity to be mostly round, but unlike other planets, has not cleared its orbital path of asteroids and other objects. Eritas Yang, one of the study's co-authors and a graduate student at Princeton University, said that one of 2017 OF201's most interesting features is its extremely elongated orbit. At its farthest point from the sun, the object is more than 1,600 times more distant than the Earth is to the sun. The researchers found the dwarf planet candidate by meticulously sifting through a huge data set from a telescope in Chile that was scanning the universe for evidence of dark energy. By cobbling together observations over time, the researchers identified a moving object with migrations that followed a clear pattern. 2017 OF201 is likely one of the most distant visible objects in the solar system, but its discovery suggests there could be other dwarf planets populating that region of space. 'We were using public data that has been there for a long time,' said Jiaxuan Li, a study co-author and a graduate student at Princeton University. 'It was just hidden there.' Li said the object is close to the sun at the moment, which means the researchers need to wait about a month before they can conduct follow-up observations using ground-based telescopes. The scientists are also hopeful that they can eventually secure some time to study the object with the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope. In the meantime, Cheng said he hasn't given up searching for Planet Nine. The new discovery, however, may throw a wrench into some long-standing theories of the planet's existence. The hypothesis behind Planet Nine is that a planet several times the size of Earth in the outer solar system could explain why a group of icy objects seem to have unusually clustered orbits. 'Under the influence of Planet Nine, all objects that do not have this specific orbital geometry will eventually become unstable and get kicked out of the solar system,' Yang said. 2017 OF201's elongated orbit makes it an outlier from the clustered objects, but Yang's calculations suggest that the orbit of 2017 OF201 should remain stable over roughly the next billion years. In other words, 2017 OF201 likely would not be able to remain if Planet Nine does exist. But Yang said more research is needed, and the discovery of the new dwarf planet candidate is not necessarily a death knell for Planet Nine. For one, the simulations only used one specific location for Planet Nine, but scientists don't all agree on where the hypothetical planet lurks — if it's there at all. Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, proposed the existence of Planet Nine in a study published with his Caltech colleague Mike Brown in 2016. He said the discovery of 2017 OF201 doesn't prove or disprove the theory. The objects in the outer solar system that are likely to show a footprint of Planet Nine's gravity, Batygin said, are the ones where the closest points on their orbits around the sun are still distant enough that they don't strongly interact with Neptune. 'This one, unfortunately, does not fall into that category,' Batygin told NBC News. 'This object is on a chaotic orbit, and so when it comes to the question of 'What does it really mean for Planet Nine?' The answer is not very much, because it's chaotic.' Batygin said he was excited to see the new study because it adds more context to how objects came to be in the outer solar system, and he called the researchers' efforts mining public data sets 'heroic.' Cheng, for his part, said he hasn't abandoned hope of finding Planet Nine. 'This whole project started as a search for Planet Nine, and I'm still in that mode,' he said. 'But this is an interesting story for scientific discovery. Who knows if Planet Nine exists, but it can be interesting if you're willing to take some risks.' This article was originally published on
