A firefighter battles the Palisades Fire while it burns homes at Pacific Coast Highway amid a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Credit: Apu Gomes/Getty ImagesShareTens of thousands of Californians are turning to a crowdsourced, nonprofit app called Watch Duty for critical, up-to-the-moment disaster updates as deadly fires continue to rage through the state. The app, which uses a mixture of official government and volunteer data to track wildfires, surpassed OpenAIs ChatGPT and Metas Threads as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store on Wednesday. Social media users have encouraged residents in affected areas to download the app in order to track the fires rapid movements and stay aware of possible evacuation orders. Apps like Watch Duty, which have seen a surge in interest in recent years, may become even more important as climate change-related natural disasters intensify in scope and scale.As of Thursday, at least five people had died from the California fires, and more than 2,000 homes and businesses had been destroyed or damaged, according to The Los Angeles Times. More than 130,000 people from Los Angeles and Ventura counties have been ordered to evacuate. There seems to be no immediate relief in sight. Warnings remain in effect for much of LA and Ventura County throughout Thursday. The cause of the fires is still under investigation.How the app worksThe Watch Duty app shows users a map with flame icons denoting areas where fires are blazing. Users receive near real-time information on a fires trajectory as well as updates from government officials and any evacuation orders. In addition to official government accounts, the app also pulls in data from wildfire cameras, satellite images, and vetted 911 calls. A team of roughly 200 citizen reporterswhich include retired and active firefighters, journalists, and emergency respondersrapidly comb through that material and then send it to users through the app. The app makers say this combination of multiple data sources and rapid vetting makes it more reliable than often chaotic, social media sources and more immediately useful than government sources.Screenshot: Popular Science As Popular Science previously reported, Watch Duty was founded in 2021 by a California software engineer named John Mills who himself had experience evacuating from a fire. Mills took a wildland firefighting course and said he quickly saw a gap in communication during disaster events. Watch Dutch was launched to fill that gap. Mills told Popular Science the app gained 22,000 users within two days of its release. That number swelled to 80,000 in less than a month. Watch Duty said it had ended 2024 with 7.2 million users a figure up from just 1.9 million a year prior. This week, as fire rages, the app reportedly had more than 600,000 new users in just 24 hours.We just want to give people peace of mind and give them information so they can make informed decisions, Mills said. It is not complex by design. Its very simple, its very easy to operate.While the app pulls from a variety of information sources, Nick Russel, the apps vice president of operations, told NBC News it also maintains direct communication with official agencies in 22 states. These officials can help make sure the rapid information being pushed through the app is accurate and high quality.One of the big things for us, our big theme, is quality over quantity. Were not in a big hurry to get information that were going to have to go and retract later, Russel told NBC News this week. And so if it takes a few extra minutes to get it out there, thats fine, but we want it to be that official info.Watch Duty isnt just for firesWatch Duty is currently focused on tracking wildfires but the apps developers have plans to expand its remit this year. In a recent blog post, Watch Duty said its looking to expand its services to include flooding alerts as well as threshold-based wind alerts and weather events that can make wildfires worse.From day one, we knew that wildfire was just our beachhead and our name represents just who we areseemingly ordinary residents who stay up late on watch duty during a disaster, Watch Duty wrote in a blog post.This will be the year when our community discovers why our organization is not called Fire Duty the blog post added.That expansion to other natural disasters could prove critical in coming years as more parts of the world are expected to feel the impact of the increase in extreme weather events amplified by climate change. Annual greenhouse gas emissions reached an all-time high last year and have led to an overall uptick in global temperatures. A United Nations report released late last year said the world is currently in a climate crunch time.Apps like Watch Duty may inevitably become more common companions for people as a range of dangerous weather events, from fires and floods to stronger hurricanes, go from remarkable to common.

There may be a mathematical reason why crossword puzzles seem to get easier as you solve them. Credit: Deposit Photos / Jordan FeegShareWhats a 11-letter concept shared by crossword puzzles and avalanches, and starts with the letter P? According to one physicist, the answer is simple: Percolation.When a statistical physicist looks at a partially solved crossword puzzle, she or he sees immediately a percolation problem: Is there a spanning path consisting of fully solved words? writes the University of Oldenburgs Alexander Hartmann in a recent paper published in Physical Review E.Percolation is ubiquitous in all fields of sciences like physics, mathematics, computer science, social sciences, or biology, he adds.Percolation, in this sense, relates to what is known as percolation theory. In mathematics and statistical physics, percolation theory concerns the behavior of a network model as additional points, nodes, or links are added to the overall system. At a certain point, these interconnected frameworks undergo a geometric version of a phase transition, suddenly becoming a much larger, new formation with novel properties.Think of it like a tea bag so saturated by water droplets that it begins to leak out of its mesh container, the snowflake that shifts a mound of frozen powder into an avalanche. Or, as Hartmann describes, the letters and words that suddenly make a formerly difficult crossword puzzle much easier to solve.Hartmann, a crossword fan, was recently curious if he could generate a single block of letters that created words in every direction, minus the puzzles trademark black spacer squares. He soon realized, however, that he was encountering a variation on a percolation problem. In mathematics and statistical physics, percolation theory concerns the behavior of a network model as additional points, nodes, or links are added to the overall system. Hartmann then devised percolation-based calculations to illustrate the concept.In the present work, crossword-puzzle percolation is introduced, where letters or words are occupied with independent or neighbor-dependent probabilities. In the model, letters correspond to sites and words to segments of sites, bordered by black sites, he explains. But Hartmann noticed something after graphing his crossword-centric formula. Get the Popular Science newsletter Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.[I]t appears that crossword-puzzle percolation comprises a new type of universal behavior, he writes. This means Hartmanns new formula is unique among all other known percolation problems.The physicist theorizes one potential explanation may be that the uncertainty one feels while staring at a largely blank crossword puzzle changes as you make progress.Since solving a word leads to an increase of the probability of solving neighboring words, this leads to further iterations, i.e., avalanches of solving words, writes Hartmann.Hartmann believes this concept can be studied further to explore relations between these abstract phase transition concepts and their physical counterparts. In the meantime, crossword puzzlers can be comforted that physics now implies that as difficult a puzzle may seem, its often darkest before the dawn. All it often takes is one letter or word to bring a puzzle to its percolation point.

Nature, Published online: 08 January 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08391-zA foundation model learns transcriptional regulatory syntax from chromatin accessibility and sequence data across a range of cell types to predict gene expression and transcription factor interactions, with generalizability to unseen cell types.

Nature, Published online: 08 January 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-03852-xArtificial intelligence is already used extensively to infer outcomes from tables of data, but this typically involves creating a model for each task. A one-size-fits-all model just made the process substantially easier.

Nature, Published online: 08 January 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-04106-6Electrochemical reactions for organic synthesis typically require intricate, specialized equipment, slowing progress in this field. Minuscule electric generators now enable faster reaction discovery and development.

We'll be exploring the Vortex Solo's capabilities to determine its effectiveness for birding, outdoor activities and basic astronomy.

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Monkey Palace Lego Strategy Board Game $26 (was $40) See at Amazon See at Walmart Earlier this week, Amazon and Walmart dropped a limited-time deal on the new Lego board game, and now that deal is even better. The family-friendly strategy game Lego Monkey Palace is on sale for only $25.56, which is over 35% off its $40 list price. Considering the retailer says it has sold over 10,000 copies of Monkey Palace over the past month, we wouldn't be surprised if it sold out soon. The Lego Store recently sold through its stock at full price. Monkey Palace Lego Strategy Board Game $26 (was $40) Monkey Palace turns building Lego into a fast-paced and varied strategy game for 2-4 players. It isn't the first officially licensed Lego board game, but it is the only one still in print at the moment. Older Lego board games tend to sell for rather high prices, so it'd be wise to add Monkey Palace to your collection sooner rather than later. See at Amazon See at Walmart What happens when a monkey stumbles upon an ancient palace in the jungle but decides to redecorate their new home? The entire place collapses, of course, so now you and up to three other players need to rebuild the structure from scratch.To help the monkey live large again, humans take turns adding Lego pieces to makeshift staircases. Each piece is worth a certain number of Monkey Credits, which are exchanged for Monkey Cards. The Monkey Card you choose to play determines which brick type(s) you use to make and decorate the staircases. As you build, you rack up Banana Points, which are counted at the end of the game to determine the winner. Games last roughly 45 minutes.Continue Reading at GameSpot

As part its delay of Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ubisoft has announced that it's putting plans in place to pursue "various transformational strategic and capitalistic options" to help put itself in the best possible financial situation. Ubisoft said it has appointed an advisory team to do this.Ubisoft said it will continue to "drive significant cost reductions" as part of this plan, though the company did not say if more layoffs are coming. Ubisoft added that it will take a "highly selective approach to investments" during this period. In total, Ubisoft said it expects to see a reduction of 200 million ($206 million USD) as part of this plan.Looking ahead, Ubisoft said it expects Q3 FY2024-25 revenue to be less than what it originally forecast, due in part to lower-than-expected game sales during the holiday, mainly due to an underperformance of Star Wars Outlaws. The downturn is also attributed in part to the discontinuation of XDefiant. Continue Reading at GameSpot

Ubisoft has delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows once again, moving the game from its planned February 14 launch date to March 20. Ubisoft says that it made the decision to provide an additional month of development to Assassin's Creed Shadows as part of its "renewed focus" on gameplay quality."This additional time will allow the team to better incorporate the player feedback gathered over the past three months and help create the best conditions for launch by continuing to engage closely with the increasingly positive Assassins Creed community," Ubisoft explained in a press release. Interestingly, this new date pushes Assassin's Creed Shadows almost out of Ubisoft's current financial year, which ends on March 31. With the company reportedly in talks with Tencent and other financial partners to potentially fund a "management-led buyout," poor sales of the game could potentially hurt the value of its share prices. In a financial call following news of the delay, Ubisoft declined to comment on the Tencent reports but it did mention that it is "exploring different options," adding, "We can't say more."Continue Reading at GameSpot