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2025 costliest year on record for wildfires, study finds
2025 costliest year on record for wildfires, study finds Wildfires accounted for 38 per cent of all insured natural hazard losses globally - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments Wildfires caused more financial damage in 2025 than in any other year, with catastrophic fires in the US, South Korea and Europe killing about 90 people and forcing roughly 300,000 to evacuate, a new study found. Wildfires accounted for 38 per cent of all insured natural hazard losses globally in 2025 – more than...
'Seismic champagne effect' may explain why fires break out long after earthquakes
'Seismic champagne effect' may explain why fires break out long after earthquakes Gaby Clark Scientific Editor Robert Egan Associate Editor Following the devastating urban fire that broke out in Wajima City after Japan's 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, investigators struggled to identify a clear ignition source, despite widespread destruction and unusual reports of flames emerging from areas with no visible combustible material. While previous studies have linked earthquakes to secondary...
Silent volcanic gas buildup revealed six months before La Palma eruption
Silent volcanic gas buildup revealed six months before La Palma eruption Lisa Lock Scientific Editor Robert Egan Associate Editor Researchers at Geosciences Barcelona (GEO3BCN-CSIC) have developed a novel way to monitor the silent accumulation of volcanic gases beneath Earth's surface using seismic ambient noise. The results could significantly improve early warning systems for volcanic eruptions. The continuous but invisible release of gases from underground is notoriously difficult to...
Record wildfire losses rocked 2025 even as global burned area neared all-time lows
Record wildfire losses rocked 2025 even as global burned area neared all-time lows Sadie Harley Scientific Editor Robert Egan Associate Editor A new analysis of global wildfire activity in 2025 reveals the world experienced some of the most destructive and deadly fire events in recent history, despite the second lowest area burned since 2002. It highlights a continued trend toward fires becoming increasingly extreme, costly, and disastrous—both economically and in lives lost. Led by the...
As conflicts rage, where are the most peaceful places in the world to travel to right now?
The Global Peace Index – the world's most comprehensive annual ranking of peacefulness across 163 countries – has released its top ten for 2026. Governmental ‘do not travel’ advisories are growing more numerous as conflicts rage around the world, and it may seem like a lot of your bucket list destinations are now off limits. So if you are planning a trip and want to prioritise safety, use this new data to help guide you.
EMBGuard: Constructing Hazard-Aware Guardrails for Safe Planning in Embodied Agents
Announce Type: new Abstract: MLLM-powered embodied agents deployed in real-world environments encounter physical hazards. However, existing approaches lack explicit mechanisms for identifying hazards and reasoning about action-conditioned risks, leading agents to either miss risky interactions or over-identify risks. To address this, we propose EMBGuard, the first MLLM-based safety guardrail for embodied agents designed to decouple physical risk reasoning from agent policy.
Scale-Free Priors and Survival Dynamics: A Bayesian Framework for Conflict Duration
arXiv:2606.01328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We have developed a fully Bayesian survival-analysis framework that reformulates inference about system lifetimes in terms of hazard and survival functions, and extends this representation to interacting actors. Starting from J.~Richard Gott's Copernican principle, we express the scale-free prior as a baseline hazard $\lambda(t)=1/t$, thereby linking a static prior over lifetimes to the dynamic language of survival analysis. In this...
This Trump-linked startup plans to put humanoid robots in the military
As Silicon Valley races to build humanoid robots that can fold laundry and pour a latte, at least one start-up sees a very different use for the technology: war or other potentially hazardous and deadly jobs. Meet Foundation Future Industries, a San Francisco-based robotics company with ties to the Trump family, developing 'dual-use' autonomous humanoid robots for both heavy industrial environments and military applications. While the robots sound like something out of a Terminator-esque...
Hail conditions on the move as winter crops face rising risk
Hail conditions on the move as winter crops face rising risk Lisa Lock Scientific Editor Robert Egan Associate Editor A hailstorm can undo a season's work in minutes. It can strike quickly and unevenly, shredding wheat, bruising fruit, flattening crops—while also leaving neighboring paddocks untouched. In a new Nature Climate Change study, scientists from UNSW Sydney say the geography and seasonality of that risk is changing.
Climate change may shift hailstorms toward Earth's poles—new study
Climate change may shift hailstorms toward Earth's poles—new study Gaby Clark Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Lead Editor Everyone has a storm story—whether it's that time you just escaped a downpour, or the hailstorm that wrote off your car. Even though hailstorms are relatively rare, they cause significant damage. Two new studies shed light on how hail might change as the world warms.