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In the future, the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycles could disrupt more than just December fishing. A study published in Nature Communications suggests that the weather patterns known as El Nino and La Nina could lead to at least a doubling of extreme droughts and floods in California later this century.

Chinese hacking attempts on American corporate intellectual property have occurred with regularity over the past three weeks, suggesting that China almost immediately began violating its newly minted cyberagreement with the United States, according to a newly published analysis by a cybersecurity company with close ties to the U.S. government.

The company’s vision initially seems fanciful: Create applications for health care featuring animated characters that can understand language in all its complexity, from context to regional idioms, detect emotion and recognize facial expressions, perceive differences in personalities, and on top of all that, constantly learn.

Three years after a groundswell of online learning swept through higher education, Stanford researchers who were at the forefront of the movement have concluded that online learning has not been the cure-all that many educators had hoped for. Nonetheless, the techniques developed for online learning may lead to great advances in how students learn, both online and in conventional classrooms.

Organisms from bacteria to humans must defend themselves against parasitic genetic elements called transposons, and the stakes are high. These pieces of DNA, which disrupt genes by jumping around in the genome, can cause so much destruction that cells have dedicated surveillance mechanisms to keep them in check.

The MinION, a handheld DNA-sequencing device developed by Oxford Nanopore, has been tested and evaluated by an independent, international consortium coordinated by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The innovative device opens up new possibilities for using sequencing technology in the field, for example in tracking disease outbreaks, testing packaged food or the trafficking of protected species.

The software, developed by the EU-funded PREDICT project, has been designed to be capable of foreseeing and predicting the possible ‘cascade effects’ of a disaster. By simulating the evolution of possible impacts stemming from, say, a catastrophic flood or storm surge on industries and public services such as transport, decision makers are in a better position to take effective action quickly and to respond to prevent a domino effect.

Scientists describe a perinatal group of Saurolophus angustirostris, a giant hadrosaur dinosaur, all likely from the same nest, found at “Dragon’s Tomb” in Mongolia, according to a study published October 14, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Leonard Dewaele from Ghent University and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Belgium and colleagues.

Water-dependent wildlife populations in sensitive African dryland regions need continued access to limited surface water resources—even as human development increases in these areas—because restricting access and concentrating wildlife populations along riparian regions can impact water quality and, potentially, human health, according to Virginia Tech research published this week in the journal PLOS ONE.

It’s a rare thing when a tropical depression develops the same exact distance between two landforms, and newborn Tropical Depression 18E has done that in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. In a visible image created at NASA using NOAA’s GOES-West satellite, the depression sits directly between Hawaii and Baja California, Mexico.