Commentary: I tried the Minecraft-themed McNuggets sauce. It might just be the hottest sauce Mickey D's has ever offered.

April 4, 20255 min readThe Crucial Role of Damage Surveys in Tornado ScienceDamage surveys provide crucial information about when, where and how strong U.S. tornadoes are to better understand disaster riskBy Andrea Thompson edited by Dean VisserStructural damage is visible at Christ Community Church after a tornado struck on April 3, 2025, in Paducah, Ky. Michael Swensen/Getty ImagesThe U.S. National Weather Service forecasts tornado outbreaksoften days in advanceand issues the watches and warnings that help people know when and how to prepare and when to take cover. NWS researchers also perform another task that is less recognized but crucial: conducting damage surveys in the wake of tornadoes such as those that struck parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana this week.To learn more about why these surveys of the devastation wrought by tornadoes is so important, Scientific American spoke with tornado researcher Jana Houser of the Ohio State University.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Why do researchers conduct damage surveys after a tornado hits?The biggest reason is to develop a climatological database for when tornadoes are occurring, where tornadoes are occurring and how intense tornadoes are.With a hurricane, you send a hurricane hunter aircraft in the air, and it drops an instrument package called a dropsonde through the hurricane. That instrument, as it is descending, acquires information about the temperature, the pressure, the winds, the moisture, etcetera. And those wind measurements are what we use to understand how intense the hurricane is.Tornadoes pose a challenge with this type of technique because theyre very small. Theyre also very intense, and theyre very difficult to predict. And oftentimes they dont occur anywhere where we could even put an instrument in it in the first place. So the best way we have available to us to determine how intense tornadoes are is looking at how much damage is caused by the tornado after the fact.A lot of people try to argue, Well, why dont we use radars, for example, to look at tornadoes? And the biggest problem with radars is the distance between the radar and the tornado. Also, where the radar is actually measuring in the tornado is not at the groundit tends to be very high. And theres not a standard height that we can always get information at, so we cannot compare apples to apples by using radar data.What does a damage survey involve?When you actually go to perform a damage survey, the first thing we want to do is figure out where the tornado started causing damage in the first place. So you want to establish a start point, and that is typically informedat least as kind of a first-order guessby radar data.Ive seen bits of straw stuck into the concrete berms of sidewalks. Jana Houser, tornado researcherWe have a list of 28 damage indicators, where we have very specific types of buildings and other objects. This is going to be, like, a hospital or a house or a gas station with an awning or a hardwood tree or a softwood tree. Meteorologists have worked intimately with civil engineers and wind engineers, using wind tunnels and tornado simulators and all of this fancy stuff, to really figure out, like, How much wind does it actually take to suck a roof off of a house? So [the amount of damage to] each one of those objects has a wind speed category associated with it [on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale]: EF1, EF2, EF3, etcetera. We use what we know about the damage incurred to back calculate the winds. We put all the various pieces together at the end of the day, and the rating assigned to a tornado is based on the most intense damage across the entire path of the tornado.Can you tell us about some of your experiences with damage surveys?Ive seen some interesting and kind of frankly gruesome things with these. I think some of the most memorable moments were after the Greensburg, Kan., tornado in May 2007. That was the very first EF5 tornado of the whole new EF scale that happened in 2007 [when it replaced the former Fujita scale].That was my first real experience with catastrophic tornado damage. The town was just leveledlike, 90 percent of the town just was wiped off the map. There were buildings where the slabs were just basically bare. There was a fire hydrantI will never forget thisthis fire hydrant was literally sucked out of the ground with, I dont know, at least six feet of pipe. And nothing was bentit was, like, perfectly straight. That just speaks to the intensity of the vertical winds that happen. You dont just have horizontal winds in a tornado.And Ive seen road scouringthis is when the tornado basically sucks pavement up off of roads. And Ive seen bits of straw stuck into the concrete berms of sidewalks. When you make that into a projectile thats moving 200-plus miles per hour, it has enough impact to literally stick into the side of a curb.If meteorologists cant get out right away to do a survey, or cant do so at all, can they use photographs?It all depends on the quality of the photograph and what the photographer knows or doesnt know about damage surveys. If you have someone out there who knows what theyre looking for and is zooming in on, for example, the connections between floor joists and the foundation [which can tell them how much wind a structure should be able to withstand], you can get a pretty good feeling for the damage.The challenge with photographs is that theyre point sources. Youre not necessarily guaranteeing full time-space coverage, unless theyre really doing thousands and thousands of pictures from different angles.And then, obviously, the challenge with not getting a damage survey crew out immediately is that people start cleaning up immediately, muddying the waters a little bit.How crucial is it to always do these surveys?Damage surveys are critically important to informing our U.S. tornado climatology. If we stop having the ability to go out and actually do damage surveys consistently, that is going to throw off our whole understanding of whats happening with tornadoes in time.We could get a false sense that there are fewer tornadoes because we dont have crews that are actually going out to survey some of these weaker tornadoes. Or, if offices are pressed for time, we might end up actually getting inaccurate EF scale ratings because they are short-staffed and are dealing with limited resources.This, then, has implications on the big question that everybody wants to know, which is: How are tornadoes changing in a world of a changing climate? If we dont have adequate data, we cant answer that question accurately.

Among the many things to love about warmer weatherthe repopulation of parks, the breeze from an open window, the annual crocus revealare the spring sales events poking their heads up like fresh blooms. On our first sweep, weve clocked eco-friendly Naturepedic mattresses marked down for Earth Day, breezy Boll & Branch robes at 20% off, plus outdoor dining sets tempting us from the sale bin at Design Within Reach.After Amazons big spring sale helped us celebrate the season earlythese promos from some of our favorite bedding and furniture retailers are picking up the baton. In the spirit of a spring refresh, were shopping linen sheets for warmer nights, air purifiers for sucking up seasonal allergens, and chaises for poolside tanning.Boll & BranchDates: April 3 to April 15Boll & Branch knows the way to our heartnamely: exceptional, fair-trade products and a 20% off discount with no minimum spend for AD readers, using the code AD20. (Is it possible this writer typed up this post in her very own Boll & Branch dream robe? Yeah, its possible.) Weve previously lauded their down duvet insert as a best-of as well as their signature hemmed sheet set, which commerce director Rachel Fletcher called some of the softest sheets Ive ever tried.Boll & Branch Down Duvet InsertBoll & BranchRachel FletcherBoll & Branch Signature Hemmed Sheet SetNaturepedicDates: April 4 to 28Naturepedic mattresses have appeared prominently among our best mattress brands and mattress-in-a-box roundups. Our commerce director Rachel Fletcher is especially taken with hers because of their high-quality latex, wool, and cotton materials. I love knowing that each element of this mattress has been rigorously tested and certified to be 100% organic, she previously noted. The brand is offering 22% off sitewide from April 4 to 28 with the code EARTH22.Naturepedic Down PillowNaturepedic EOS Classic Organic MattressBrooklinenDates: OngoingWe wrote an entire ode to Brooklinen, including a list of all our favorite bedding buys. That includes their Luxe Sateen Core Sheet Set (15% off), which is loved by multiple AD staffers for having, as commerce director Rachel Fletcher puts it, a super classic, smooth, and crisp feel.Commerce writer Julia Harrison just fell hard for their newest releasethe washed linen set (also 15% off). This has none of the scratch of new linen and all of the softness of lived-in bedding. This is also the time to indulge in some of their bestsellersthe down alternative comforter (the perfect mix of cool and comfort, says social media manager Rebecca Grambone), the down pillow, or the bath towelswhile theyre marked down.Brooklinen Down Alternative ComforterBrooklinen Plush Turkish Cotton Bath TowelsDesign Within ReachDates: April 1 to 21This one-stop shop for iconic designer pieces is offering an aptly timed 25% off deal on all outdoor furniture. We recently clocked Hays Palissades set in this Colorado home designed by Heidi Caillier, which is on sale among other chaises, table umbrellas, and outdoor dining sets for all your spring entertaining needs.HAY Palissade Dining SetHeller Fortune ChairCastleryDates: April 7 to May 11

Physical pre-orders are now live.The Switch 2 has officially locked in a release date and while a lot of games have already been confirmed for the platform, it looks like we might have one more.It seems Konami will be releasing its Suikoden 1 & 2 HD Remaster package on the Switch 2, with listings for this game already popping up on sites like Play-asia. It will apparently be made available alongside the launch of the system on 5th June 2025 and it's priced at $34.99 USD (or your regional equivalent) with pre-orders now live.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

A new study appears to lend credence to allegations that OpenAI trained at least some of its AI models on copyrighted content.OpenAI is embroiled in suits brought by authors, programmers, and other rights-holders who accuse the company of using their works books, codebases, and so on to develop its models without permission. OpenAI has long claimed a fair use defense, but the plaintiffs in these cases argue that there isnt a carve-out in U.S. copyright law for training data.The study, which was co-authored by researchers at the University of Washington, the University of Copenhagen, and Stanford, proposes a new method for identifying training data memorized by models behind an API, like OpenAIs. Models are prediction engines. Trained on a lot of data, they learn patterns thats how theyre able to generate essays, photos, and more. Most of the outputs arent verbatim copies of the training data, but owing to the way models learn, some inevitably are. Image models have been found to regurgitate screenshots from movies they were trained on, while language models have been observed effectively plagiarizing news articles.The studys method relies on words that the co-authors call high-surprisal that is, words that stand out as uncommon in the context of a larger body of work. For example, the word radar in the sentence Jack and I sat perfectly still with the radar humming would be considered high-surprisal because its statistically less likely than words such as engine or radio to appear before humming. The co-authors probed several OpenAI models, including GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, for signs of memorization by removing high-surprisal words from snippets of fiction books and New York Times pieces and having the models try to guess which words had been masked. If the models managed to guess correctly, its likely they memorized the snippet during training, concluded the co-authors.An example of having a model guess a high-surprisal word.Image Credits:OpenAIAccording to the results of the tests, GPT-4 showed signs of having memorized portions of popular fiction books, including books in a dataset containing samples of copyrighted ebooks called BookMIA. The results also suggested that the model memorized portions of New York Times articles, albeit at a comparatively lower rate. Abhilasha Ravichander, a doctoral student at the University of Washington and a co-author of the study, told TechCrunch that the findings shed light on the contentious data models might have been trained on.In order to have large language models that are trustworthy, we need to have models that we can probe and audit and examine scientifically, Ravichander said. Our work aims to provide a tool to probe large language models, but there is a real need for greater data transparency in the whole ecosystem.OpenAI has long advocated forlooser restrictionson developing models using copyrighted data. While the company has certain content licensing deals in place and offers opt-out mechanisms that allow copyright owners to flag content theyd prefer the company not use for training purposes, it has lobbied several governments to codify fair use rules around AI training approaches.

Autodesk has added the Golaem plug-in in the latest release of its Design & Make software for Media & Entertainment Collection, to simplify the process of creating large-scale crowd scenes.Crowd simulation has long been a challenge, and our mission has always been to make it accessible to all, said Nicolas Chaverou, Golaem co-founder and principal technical product manager at Autodesk. Now, as part of Autodesks M&E Collection, were thrilled that Golaem is in the hands of more studios and can empower more artists to create stunning, large-scale scenes with ease.Golaems Layout tool allows studios to adjust and customize characters directly in the Maya viewport without altering simulations, while the built-in procedural animation engine helps control multiple characters at once. Once the simulation is set up in Maya, it can be transferred to 3ds Max, Houdini, Unreal, or Katana using Golaems dedicated plug-ins.Meet the new M&E Collection with Autodesk Golaem:Major industry formats are supported, including OpenUSD. The Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection allows running Arnold on up to 5 machines, making crowd rendering faster and more cost-efficient.Were breaking down long-standing technical barriers to get artists into the creative zone faster, said Ben Fischler, Autodesks director of product management for content creation. With new crowd simulation, AI-powered tools, and Flow-connected workflows, our latest updates help you reach that last 80% - where the real fun begins, and you can focus on making your shot work for the story.Flow Animating in Context integrates surrounding shots from Flow Production Tracking (formerly ShotGrid) directly into Mayas timeline, and allows users to switch between different pipeline steps. The latest updates to Maya and 3ds Max also include hundreds of enhancements and fixes, including:Modeling improvements The powerful Volume Booleans tool is now available in Maya and 3ds Max, creating a more unified Boolean engine between the two tools. This update makes it easier to explore freeform shapes and build complex organic forms from simple primitives.Liquids Bifrost's new liquid simulation feature is now available directly within the Bifrost graph. The new FLIP solver offers adaptive resolution for efficient computation, particle-based foam, and improved velocity estimation. You can also emit and blend colored liquids. It is perfect for large-scale, non-viscous fluids.OpenUSD enhancements Improvements continue across both Maya and 3ds Max OpenUSD, with added support for axis and scale adjustments in Maya and recently, an Attribute Editor in 3ds Max. A long-requested feature, Light Linking, is also now available in both tools, giving you greater control over rendering.OpenPBR integration OpenPBR is now the default shading option in both Maya and 3ds Max, bringing enhanced artistic controls, more accurate material representation across tools and improved interchange with other software.Source: Autodesk Journalist, antique shop owner, aspiring gemologistL'Wrenbrings a diverse perspective to animation, where every frame reflects her varied passions.

Spooked by Trump's new tariffs, Nintendo is pausing console pre-orders in the US. The June 5 launch is unchanged.

Looking for help with today's New York Times Wordle? Here are hints, clues and commentary to help you solve today's Wordle and sharpen your guessing game.

After upgrading with gaming PC deals, you should be on the lookout for monitor deals that will give justice to your new computers processing power. If youve already spent most of budget, dont worry because you can get a new screen for as low as $99 with this offer from B&H Photo Video. The retailer is offering a $20 discount for the Asus VU249CFE-B gaming monitor, pulling its already affordable original price of $119 even further down. Were not sure how long stocks will last for this display though, so we highly recommend hurrying with your purchase.Lets be honest here theres no way that the affordable Asus VU249CFE-B will challenge the features and performance of the best gaming monitors. However, its a solid option that checks most of the boxes in our computer monitor buying guide if youre a gamer. Its 100Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time enable smooth animations and fast reaction times while youre playing the best PC games, while Full HD resolution on its 24-inch screen will let you appreciate the sharp details in the graphics of the latest titles.A gamers desk can get cluttered with accessories, and the Asus VU249CFE-B gaming monitor will help with that with its built-in cable management system. The display also features the brands Eye Care Plus technology, which includes an adjustable blue light filter and a flicker-free screen to keep your eyes comfortable even after hours of playing. The monitor also has HDMI and USB-C ports, and auto brightness adjustment depending on your environments lighting.RelatedYou dont need to spend much if you want a new gaming monitor you wont even have to spend $100 with this deal from B&H Photo Video for the Asus VU249CFE-B. From its sticker price of $119, its down to just $99 following a $20 discount. Youre going to have to act fast and complete your transaction as soon as possible though, as theres a chance that the stocks of the Asus VU249CFE-B gaming monitor that are up for sale are already gone as soon as tomorrow.Editors Recommendations

Passing on the costs Not just Switch 2: ESA warns Trumps tariffs will hurt the entire game industry "[It's] hard to imagine a world where tariffs like these dont impact pricing." Kyle Orland Apr 4, 2025 4:36 pm | 29 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThis morning's announcement that Nintendo is delaying US preorders for the Switch 2 immediately increased the salience of President Trump's proposed wide-reaching import tariffs for millions of American Nintendo fans. Additionally, the Entertainment Software Associationa lobbying group that represents the game industry's interests in Washingtonis warning that the effects of Trump's tariffs on the gaming world won't stop with Nintendo."There are so many devices we play video games on," ESA senior vice president Aubrey Quinn said in an interview with IGN just as Nintendo's preorder delay news broke. "There are other consoles... VR headsets, our smartphones, people who love PC games; if we think it's just the Switch, then we aren't taking it seriously."This is company-agnostic, this is an entire industry," she continued. "There's going to be an impact on the entire industry."While Trump's tariff proposal includes a 10 percent tax on imports from pretty much every country, it also includes a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam and a 54 percent total tariff on China, the two countries where most console hardware is produced. Quinn told IGN that it's "hard to imagine a world where tariffs like these dont impact pricing" for those consoles.More than that, though, Quinn warns that massive tariffs would tamp down overall consumer spending, which would have knock-on effects for game industry revenues, employment, and research and development investment."Video game consoles are sold under tight margins in order to reduce the barrier to entry for consumers," the ESA notes in its issue page on tariffs. "Tariffs mean that the additional costs would be passed along to consumers, resulting in a ripple effect of harm for the industry and the jobs it generates and supports.Not just a foreign problemThe negative impacts wouldn't be limited to foreign companies like Nintendo, Quinn warned, because "even American-based companies, they're getting products that need to cross into American borders to make those consoles, to make those games. And so there's going to be a real impact regardless of company."Some might argue that video game companies (and others) should simply bring more of their production costs within the US to avoid paying Trump's tariffs. But in an interview with Game File on Wednesday, Quinn noted that "supply chains are complicated and, certainly, supply chains dont change overnight. Everything that is considered or decided cant be a quick turnaround and cant be a knee-jerk reaction to any particular announcement."Last month, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella warned that proposed (and later largely delayed) 25 percent tariffs on imports from Mexicowhere the vast majority of physical video games are producedcould lead to "a sharp downtick in the number of disc-based games that get released physically in the US." Replacing that Mexican disc production capacity with domestic alternatives would take "significant investment" in a market segment that is "now half what it was in 2021 and declining rapidly," Piscatella said.Making your voice heardLate last month, the ESA joined in a multi-industry letter to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer saying that "U.S. tariffs on imports of critical technology inputs and products would harm the very U.S. businesses the President seeks to boost and would risk undercutting long-term U.S. technology leadership." The letter urged Greer to "promote the global engagement with our trading partners" and to "use existing trade tools that strengthen trade relations with key markets for U.S. products and services" instead of tariffs.In 2020, the ESA partnered with the Consumer Technology Association to successfully argue for an exemption to tariffs then being imposed on China. Trump has recently signaled that similar industry-specific exemptions may be possible this time around as well.While Quinn told IGN that the ESA is meeting with employees at the White House and US Trade Representative's office, she said those talks are more likely to make an impact if "more members of government, elected officials, and their staff ... hear that their constituents are concerned."Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming EditorKyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 29 Comments