An artist's illustration of an unlucky massive star approaching a supermassive black hole. Credit: University of Hawai'i Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. At any given time across the universe, massive cosmic bodies are releasing incomprehensible amounts of energy. Stars burn like celestial nuclear fusion reactors, quasars emit thousands of times the luminosity of the Milky Way galaxy, and asteroids slam into planets. But all of these pale in comparison to a new class of events discovered by researchers at the University of Hawai’i’s Institute for Astronomy (IfA). According to their findings published June 4 in the journal Science Advances, it’s time to classify the universe’s most energetic explosions as extreme nuclear transients–or ENTs. ENTs are as devastating as they are rare. They only occur when a massive star at least three times heavier than the sun drifts too close to a supermassive black hole. The colliding forces subsequently obliterate the star, sending out plumes of energy across huge swaths of space. Similar events known as tidal disruption events (TDEs) are known to occur on a (comparatively) smaller scale, and have been documented for over a decade. But ENTs are something else entirely. “ENTs are different beasts,” study lead author and astronomer Jason Hinkle explained in an accompanying statement. “Not only are ENTs far brighter than normal tidal disruption events, but they remain luminous for years, far surpassing the energy output of even the brightest known supernova explosions.” Hinkle was first tipped off to ENTs while looking into transients—longlasting flares that spew energy from a galaxy’s center. Two particularly strange examples captured by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission caught his eye. The pair of events brightened over a much longer timeframe than previously documented transients, but lacked some of their usual characteristics. “Gaia doesn’t tell you what a transient is, just that something changed in brightness,” Hinkle said. “But when I saw these smooth, long-lived flares from the centers of distant galaxies, I knew we were looking at something unusual.” Hinkle soon reached out to observatory teams around the world for what would become a multiyear project to understand these anomalies. In the process, a third suspect was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego. After months of analysis, Hinkle and collaborators realized they were witnessing something unprecedented. An infrared echo tells us that a dusty torus surrounds the central black hole and newly-formed accretion disk. Credit: University of Hawai’i The ENTs analyzed by astronomers displayed smoother, longer lasting flares that pointed towards something very particular—a supermassive black hole accreting a giant, wayward star. This contrasts with a more standard black hole that typically acquires its material and energy unpredictably, resulting in irregular brightness fluctuations. The energy and luminosity of an ENT boggles the mind. The most powerful ENT documented in Hinkle’s study, Gaia18cdj, generated 25 times more energy than the most powerful known supernovae. For reference, a standard supernova puts out as much energy in a single year as the sun does across its entire 10 billion year lifespan. Gaia18cdj, meanwhile, manages to give off 100 suns’ worth of energy over just 12 months. The implications of ENTs and their massive energy surges go far beyond their impressive energy outputs. Astronomers believe they contribute to some of the most pivotal events in the cosmos. “These ENTs don’t just mark the dramatic end of a massive star’s life. They illuminate the processes responsible for growing the largest black holes in the universe,” said Hinkle. From here on Earth, ENTs can also help researchers as they continue studying massive, distant black holes. “Because they’re so bright, we can see them across vast cosmic distances—and in astronomy, looking far away means looking back in time,” explained study co-author and astronomer Benjamin Shappee. “By observing these prolonged flares, we gain insights into black hole growth when the universe was half its current age… forming stars and feeding their supermassive black holes 10 times more vigorously than they do today.” There’s a catch for astronomers, however. While supernovae are relatively well-documented, ENTs are estimated to occur at least 10 million times less often. This means that further study requires consistent monitoring of the cosmos backed by the support of international governments, astronomical associations, and the public.

More enterprises have moved to pay-for-performance salary and promotion models that measure progress toward goals -- but how do you measure goals for a maintenance programmer who barrels through a request backlog but delivers marginal value for the business, or for a business analyst whose success is predicated on forging intangibles like trust and cooperation with users so things can get done? It’s an age-old question facing companies, now that 77% of them use some type of pay-for-performance model. What are some popular pay-for-performance use cases? A factory doing piece work that pays employees based upon the number of items they assemble. A call center that pays agents based on how many calls they complete per day. A bank teller who gets rewarded for how many customers they sign up for credit cards. An IT project team that gets a bonus for completing a major project ahead of schedule. The IT example differs from the others, because it depends on team and not individual execution, but there nevertheless is something tangible to measure. The other use cases are more clearcut -- although they don’t account for pieces in the plant that were poorly assembled in haste to make quota and had to be reworked, or a call center agent who pushes calls off to someone else so they can end their calls in six minutes or less, or the teller who signs up X number of customers for credit cards, although two-thirds of them never use the credit card they signed up for. Related:In short, there are flaws in pay-for-performance models just as there are in other types of compensation models that organizations use. So, what’s the best path for IT for CIOs who want to implement pay for performance? One approach is to measure pay for performance based upon four key elements: hard results, effort, skill, and communications. The mix of these elements will vary, depending on the type of position each IT staff member performs. Here are two examples of pay per performance by position: 1. Computer maintenance programmers and help desk specialists Historically, IT departments have used hard numbers like how many open requests a computer maintenance programmer has closed, or how many calls a help desk employee has solved. There is merit in using hard results, and hard results should be factored into performance reviews for these individuals -- but hard numbers don’t tell the whole story.  For example, how many times has a help desk agent gone the extra mile with a difficult user or software bug, taking the time to see the entire process through until it is thoroughly solved? lf the issue was of a global nature, did the Help Desk agent follow up by letting others who use the application know that a bug was fixed? For the maintenance programmer who has completed the most open requests, which of these requests really solved a major business pain point? For both help desk and maintenance programming employees, were the changes and fixes properly documented and communicated to everyone with a need to know? And did these employees demonstrate the skills needed to solve their issues? Related:It’s difficult to capture hard results on elements like effort, communication and skills, but one way to go about it is to survey user departments on individual levels of service and effectiveness. From there, it’s up to IT managers to determinate the “mix” of hard results, effort, communication and skills on which the employee will be evaluated, and to communicate upfront to the employee what the pay for performance assessment will be based on. 2. Business analysts and trainers Business analysts and trainers are difficult to quantify in pay for performance models because so much of their success depends upon other people. A business analyst can know everything there is to know about a particular business area and its systems, but if the analyst is working with unresponsive users, or lacks the soft skills needed to communicate with users, the pay for performance can’t be based upon the technology skillset alone.  Related:IT trainers face a somewhat different dilemma when it  comes to performance evaluation: they can produce the training that new staff members need before staff is deployed on key projects,  but if a project gets delayed and this causes trainees to lose the knowledge that they learned, there is little the trainer can do aside from offering a refresher course. Can pay for performance be used for positions like these? It’s a mixed answer. Yes, pay per performance can be used for trainers, based upon how many individuals the trainer trains and how many new courses the trainer obtains or develops. These are the hard results. However, since so much of training’s execution depends upon other people downstream, like project managers who must start projects on time so new skills aren’t lost,  managers of training should also consider pay for performance elements such as effort (has the trainer consistently gone the extra mile to make things work?), skills and communication.  In sum, for both business analysts and trainers, there are hard results that can be factored into a pay for performance formula, but there is also a need to survey each position’s “customers” -- those individuals (and their managers) who utilized the business analyst’s or trainer’s skills and products to accomplish their respective objectives in projects and training. Were these user-customers satisfied?  Summary Remarks The value that IT employees contribute to overall IT and to the business at large is a combination of tangible and intangible results. Pay for performance models are well suited to gauge tangible outcomes, but they fall short when it comes to the intangibles that could be just as important. Many years ago, when Pat Riley was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, an interviewer asked what type of metrics he used when he measured the effectiveness of individual players on the basketball court. Was it the number of points, rebounds, or assists? Riley said he used an “effort" index. For example, how many times did a player go up to get a rebound, even if he didn’t end up with the ball? Riley said the effort individual players exhibited mattered, because even if they didn’t get the rebound, they were creating situations so someone else on the team could. IT is similar. It’s why OKR International, a performance consultancy, stated “Intangibles often create or destroy value quietly -- until their impact is too big to ignore. In the long run, they are the unseen levers that determine whether strategy thrives or withers.”  What CIOs and IT leadership can do when they use pay for performance is to assure that hard results, effort, communications and skills are appropriately blended for each IT staff position, and its responsibilities and realities -- because you can’t attach a numerical measurement to everything -- but you can observe visible changes that begin to manifest when a business analyst turns around what has been a hostile relationship with a user department and you begin to get things done. 

More enterprises have moved to pay-for-performance salary and promotion models that measure progress toward goals -- but how do you measure goals for a maintenance programmer who barrels through a request backlog but delivers marginal value for the business, or for a business analyst whose success is predicated on forging intangibles like trust and cooperation with users so things can get done? It’s an age-old question facing companies, now that 77% of them use some type of pay-for-performance model. What are some popular pay-for-performance use cases? A factory doing piece work that pays employees based upon the number of items they assemble. A call center that pays agents based on how many calls they complete per day. A bank teller who gets rewarded for how many customers they sign up for credit cards. An IT project team that gets a bonus for completing a major project ahead of schedule. The IT example differs from the others, because it depends on team and not individual execution, but there nevertheless is something tangible to measure. The other use cases are more clearcut -- although they don’t account for pieces in the plant that were poorly assembled in haste to make quota and had to be reworked, or a call center agent who pushes calls off to someone else so they can end their calls in six minutes or less, or the teller who signs up X number of customers for credit cards, although two-thirds of them never use the credit card they signed up for. Related:In short, there are flaws in pay-for-performance models just as there are in other types of compensation models that organizations use. So, what’s the best path for IT for CIOs who want to implement pay for performance? One approach is to measure pay for performance based upon four key elements: hard results, effort, skill, and communications. The mix of these elements will vary, depending on the type of position each IT staff member performs. Here are two examples of pay per performance by position: 1. Computer maintenance programmers and help desk specialists Historically, IT departments have used hard numbers like how many open requests a computer maintenance programmer has closed, or how many calls a help desk employee has solved. There is merit in using hard results, and hard results should be factored into performance reviews for these individuals -- but hard numbers don’t tell the whole story.  For example, how many times has a help desk agent gone the extra mile with a difficult user or software bug, taking the time to see the entire process through until it is thoroughly solved? lf the issue was of a global nature, did the Help Desk agent follow up by letting others who use the application know that a bug was fixed? For the maintenance programmer who has completed the most open requests, which of these requests really solved a major business pain point? For both help desk and maintenance programming employees, were the changes and fixes properly documented and communicated to everyone with a need to know? And did these employees demonstrate the skills needed to solve their issues? Related:It’s difficult to capture hard results on elements like effort, communication and skills, but one way to go about it is to survey user departments on individual levels of service and effectiveness. From there, it’s up to IT managers to determinate the “mix” of hard results, effort, communication and skills on which the employee will be evaluated, and to communicate upfront to the employee what the pay for performance assessment will be based on. 2. Business analysts and trainers Business analysts and trainers are difficult to quantify in pay for performance models because so much of their success depends upon other people. A business analyst can know everything there is to know about a particular business area and its systems, but if the analyst is working with unresponsive users, or lacks the soft skills needed to communicate with users, the pay for performance can’t be based upon the technology skillset alone.  Related:IT trainers face a somewhat different dilemma when it  comes to performance evaluation: they can produce the training that new staff members need before staff is deployed on key projects,  but if a project gets delayed and this causes trainees to lose the knowledge that they learned, there is little the trainer can do aside from offering a refresher course. Can pay for performance be used for positions like these? It’s a mixed answer. Yes, pay per performance can be used for trainers, based upon how many individuals the trainer trains and how many new courses the trainer obtains or develops. These are the hard results. However, since so much of training’s execution depends upon other people downstream, like project managers who must start projects on time so new skills aren’t lost,  managers of training should also consider pay for performance elements such as effort (has the trainer consistently gone the extra mile to make things work?), skills and communication.  In sum, for both business analysts and trainers, there are hard results that can be factored into a pay for performance formula, but there is also a need to survey each position’s “customers” -- those individuals (and their managers) who utilized the business analyst’s or trainer’s skills and products to accomplish their respective objectives in projects and training. Were these user-customers satisfied?  Summary Remarks The value that IT employees contribute to overall IT and to the business at large is a combination of tangible and intangible results. Pay for performance models are well suited to gauge tangible outcomes, but they fall short when it comes to the intangibles that could be just as important. Many years ago, when Pat Riley was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, an interviewer asked what type of metrics he used when he measured the effectiveness of individual players on the basketball court. Was it the number of points, rebounds, or assists? Riley said he used an “effort" index. For example, how many times did a player go up to get a rebound, even if he didn’t end up with the ball? Riley said the effort individual players exhibited mattered, because even if they didn’t get the rebound, they were creating situations so someone else on the team could. IT is similar. It’s why OKR International, a performance consultancy, stated “Intangibles often create or destroy value quietly -- until their impact is too big to ignore. In the long run, they are the unseen levers that determine whether strategy thrives or withers.”  What CIOs and IT leadership can do when they use pay for performance is to assure that hard results, effort, communications and skills are appropriately blended for each IT staff position, and its responsibilities and realities -- because you can’t attach a numerical measurement to everything -- but you can observe visible changes that begin to manifest when a business analyst turns around what has been a hostile relationship with a user department and you begin to get things done. 

Scholars of gender and sexuality have been exploring ‘queer spaces’ for over six decades. While for many years homes and domesticity remained out of focus or at the margins of queer space research, a recent ‘domestic turn’ has brought queer people’s homes to the foreground. Queer Spaces (2022), a recollection of case studies of queer domestic spaces edited by Joshua Mardell and Adam Nathaniel Furman, is just one significant work within the recent shift to explore the intersection of queer identities and domesticity, for example. Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival Over the past four years I have documented the homes of LGBTQ+ people and come to understand how they inhabit them through interviews, detailed spatial drawings and the creation of dollhouses. This methodology deliberately subverts traditional architectural model-making conventions, emphasising narrative over spatial clarity, interior qualities over façades, and incorporating elaborate details that standard architectural models typically avoid. While this may feel like a rather unusual pursuit for an architect, it’s also one I feel is necessary and urgent. Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival My current research builds upon years of professional practice in London and scrutinises the limitations of standardised design approaches. Through interviews and detailed spatial surveys, I am examining how queer families navigate living spaces designed according to the London Plan’s Housing Design Guide.Advertisement Early findings from my field work show a chasm between the queer daily lives of some of London’s LGBTQ+ families and the rigid homes the standard produces. In cases where spatial flexibility is available within domestic architecture, wonderful, innovative, caring and radical uses of domestic space emerge, enabling queer forms of raising children or coexisting with current and former lovers. These are not just joyful nice-to-haves, but essential for my participants to live their queerness at home, in full. Homes should not just be where queer folk feel safe; they must also be spaces where our queerness flourishes. Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival The housing emergency in the UK and most of the Western world has urged architects, planners and developers to focus on an increased delivery of ‘units of housing’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my early findings suggest that this sense of urgency risks under-delivering on quality and space. Housing standards have codified aesthetic, functional, and spatial homogeneity. They reproduce conservative ideals of housing and family at a time when families are growing more and more diverse. All the while, with the expansion of permitted development rights, they are failing to deliver an overall improvement in size and quality of the UK’s housing stock. Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival The need for an alternative, open-ended and, perhaps, queer toolkit to design homes – one that expands the ethical and aesthetic horizons of housing design – has never been more urgent. I am therefore also working on developing my ‘disobedient dollhouse making’ as a design tool. One that puts future users at the centre, allowing them to fabulate a different horizon for housing design. My aim is to use dollhouses as a ‘serious’ design game that enables participants to explore the true possibilities of housing beyond the ‘straightjacket’ of the standard. Follow Daniel Ovalle Costal’s research at @QueerDomCanon on Instagram 2025-06-03 Fran Williams comment and share

In a chilling sign of how far law enforcement surveillance has encroached on personal liberties, that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. The officer searched 6,809 different camera networks maintained by surveillance tech company Flock Safety, including states where abortion access is protected by law, such as Washington and Illinois. The search record listed the reason plainly: “had an abortion, search for female.” Screenshot of data After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, states were given sweeping authority to ban and even criminalize abortion. In Texas—where the officer who conducted this search is based—abortion is now almost entirely banned. But in Washington and Illinois, where many of the searched Flock cameras are located, abortion remains legal and protected as a fundamental right up to fetal viability. The post-Dobbs legal landscape has also opened the door for law enforcement to exploit virtually any form of data—license plates, phone records, geolocation data—to pursue individuals across state lines. has documented more than 1,800 agencies have deployed ALPRs, but at least 4,000 agencies are able to run searches through some agencies in Flock's network. Many agencies share the data freely with other agencies across the country, with little oversight, restriction, or even standards for accessing data.  While this particular data point explicitly mentioned an abortion, scores of others in the audit logs released through public records requests simply list "investigation" as the reason for the plate search, with no indication of the alleged offense. That means other searches targeting someone for abortion, or another protected right in that jurisdiction, could be effectively invisible. This case underscores our growing concern: that the mass surveillance infrastructure—originally sold as a tool to find stolen cars or missing persons—is now being used to target people seeking reproductive healthcare. This unchecked, warrant-less access that allows law enforcement to surveil across state lines blurs the line between “protection” and persecution. From Missing Cars to Monitoring Bodies EFF has long warned about the dangers of ALPRs, which scan license plates, log time and location data, and build a detailed picture of people's movements. Companies like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions offer law enforcement agencies access to nationwide databases of these readers, and in some cases, allow them to stake out locations like abortion clinics, or create “hot lists” of license plates to track in real time. Flock's technology also allows officers to search for a vehicle based on attributes like color, make and model, even without a plate number. The threat is compounded by how investigations often begin. A report published by If/When/How on the criminalization of self-managed abortion found that about a quarter of adult cases (26%) were reported to law enforcement by acquaintances entrusted with information, such as “friends, parents, or intimate partners” and another 18% through “other” means. This means that with ALPR tech, a tip from anyone can instantly escalate into a nationwide manhunt. And as Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund explained to 404 Media, anti-abortion activists have long been documenting the plates of patients and providers who visit reproductive health facilities—data that can now be easily cross-referenced with ALPR databases. The 404 Media report proves that this isn’t a hypothetical concern. In 2023, a months-long EFF investigation involving hundreds of public records requests uncovered that many California police departments were sharing records containing detailed driving profiles of local residents with out-of-state agencies, despite state laws explicitly prohibiting this. This means that even in so-called “safe” states, your data might end up helping law enforcement in Texas or Idaho prosecute you—or your doctor.  That’s why we demanded that 75 California police departments stop sharing ALPR data with anti-abortion states, an effort that has largely been successful. Surveillance and Reproductive Freedom Cannot Coexist We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Lawmakers who support reproductive rights must recognize that abortion access and mass surveillance are incompatible.  The systems built to track stolen cars and issue parking tickets have become tools to enforce the most personal and politically charged laws in the country. What began as a local concern over privacy has escalated into a national civil liberties crisis. Yesterday’s license plate readers have morphed into today’s reproductive dragnet. Now, it’s time for decisive action. Our leaders must roll back the dangerous surveillance systems they've enabled. We must enact strong, enforceable state laws to limit data sharing, ensure proper oversight, and dismantle these surveillance pipelines before they become the new normal–or even just eliminate the systems altogether.

In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California, trees that have persisted through rain and shine for thousands of years are now facing multiple threats triggered by a changing climate. Scientists and park managers once thought giant sequoia forests were nearly impervious to stressors like wildfire, drought and pests. Yet, even very large trees are proving vulnerable, particularly when those stressors are amplified by rising temperatures and increasing weather extremes. The rapid pace of climate change—combined with threats like the spread of invasive species and diseases—can affect ecosystems in ways that defy expectations based on past experiences. As a result, Western forests are transitioning to grasslands or shrublands after unprecedented wildfires. Woody plants are expanding into coastal wetlands. Coral reefs are being lost entirely. To protect these places, which are valued for their natural beauty and the benefits they provide for recreation, clean water and wildlife, forest and land managers increasingly must anticipate risks they have never seen before. And they must prepare for what those risks will mean for stewardship as ecosystems rapidly transform. As ecologists and a climate scientist, we’re helping them figure out how to do that. Managing changing ecosystems Traditional management approaches focus on maintaining or restoring how ecosystems looked and functioned historically. However, that doesn’t always work when ecosystems are subjected to new and rapidly shifting conditions. Ecosystems have many moving parts—plants, animals, fungi, and microbes; and the soil, air and water in which they live—that interact with one another in complex ways. When the climate changes, it’s like shifting the ground on which everything rests. The results can undermine the integrity of the system, leading to ecological changes that are hard to predict. To plan for an uncertain future, natural resource managers need to consider many different ways changes in climate and ecosystems could affect their landscapes. Essentially, what scenarios are possible? Preparing for multiple possibilities At Sequoia and Kings Canyon, park managers were aware that climate change posed some big risks to the iconic trees under their care. More than a decade ago, they undertook a major effort to explore different scenarios that could play out in the future. It’s a good thing they did, because some of the more extreme possibilities they imagined happened sooner than expected. In 2014, drought in California caused the giant sequoias’ foliage to die back, something never documented before. In 2017, sequoia trees began dying from insect damage. And, in 2020 and 2021, fires burned through sequoia groves, killing thousands of ancient trees. While these extreme events came as a surprise to many people, thinking through the possibilities ahead of time meant the park managers had already begun to take steps that proved beneficial. One example was prioritizing prescribed burns to remove undergrowth that could fuel hotter, more destructive fires. The key to effective planning is a thoughtful consideration of a suite of strategies that are likely to succeed in the face of many different changes in climates and ecosystems. That involves thinking through wide-ranging potential outcomes to see how different strategies might fare under each scenario—including preparing for catastrophic possibilities, even those considered unlikely. For example, prescribed burning may reduce risks from both catastrophic wildfire and drought by reducing the density of plant growth, whereas suppressing all fires could increase those risks in the long run. Strategies undertaken today have consequences for decades to come. Managers need to have confidence that they are making good investments when they put limited resources toward actions like forest thinning, invasive species control, buying seeds or replanting trees. Scenarios can help inform those investment choices. Constructing credible scenarios of ecological change to inform this type of planning requires considering the most important unknowns. Scenarios look not only at how the climate could change, but also how complex ecosystems could react and what surprises might lay beyond the horizon. Scientists at the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center are collaborating with managers in the Nebraska Sandhills to develop scenarios of future ecological change under different climate conditions, disturbance events like fires and extreme droughts, and land uses like grazing. [Photos: T. Walz, M. Lavin, C. Helzer, O. Richmond, NPS (top to bottom)., CC BY] Key ingredients for crafting ecological scenarios To provide some guidance to people tasked with managing these landscapes, we brought together a group of experts in ecology, climate science, and natural resource management from across universities and government agencies. We identified three key ingredients for constructing credible ecological scenarios: 1. Embracing ecological uncertainty: Instead of banking on one “most likely” outcome for ecosystems in a changing climate, managers can better prepare by mapping out multiple possibilities. In Nebraska’s Sandhills, we are exploring how this mostly intact native prairie could transform, with outcomes as divergent as woodlands and open dunes. 2. Thinking in trajectories: It’s helpful to consider not just the outcomes, but also the potential pathways for getting there. Will ecological changes unfold gradually or all at once? By envisioning different pathways through which ecosystems might respond to climate change and other stressors, natural resource managers can identify critical moments where specific actions, such as removing tree seedlings encroaching into grasslands, can steer ecosystems toward a more desirable future. 3. Preparing for surprises: Planning for rare disasters or sudden species collapses helps managers respond nimbly when the unexpected strikes, such as a severe drought leading to widespread erosion. Being prepared for abrupt changes and having contingency plans can mean the difference between quickly helping an ecosystem recover and losing it entirely. Over the past decade, access to climate model projections through easy-to-use websites has revolutionized resource managers’ ability to explore different scenarios of how the local climate might change. What managers are missing today is similar access to ecological model projections and tools that can help them anticipate possible changes in ecosystems. To bridge this gap, we believe the scientific community should prioritize developing ecological projections and decision-support tools that can empower managers to plan for ecological uncertainty with greater confidence and foresight. Ecological scenarios don’t eliminate uncertainty, but they can help to navigate it more effectively by identifying strategic actions to manage forests and other ecosystems. Kyra Clark-Wolf is a research scientist in ecological transformation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Brian W. Miller is a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. Imtiaz Rangwala is a research scientist in climate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A Fungal Disease Ravaged North American Bats. Now, Researchers Found a Second Species That Suggests It Could Happen Again White-nose syndrome caused millions of bat deaths, and scientists are sounding the alarm that a second fungus could be disastrous if it reaches American wildlife Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor May 30, 2025 A little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) is seen with white fuzz on its nose, a characteristic of the deadly white-nose syndrome. Ryan von Linden / New York Department of Environmental Conservation In February 2006, a cave explorer near Albany, New York, took the first photograph of bats with a mysterious white growth on their faces. Later, biologists studying the mammals in caves and mines discovered piles of dead bats in the state—also with the fuzzy white mold. The scientists were floored. For years, no one knew what was causing the mass die-offs from this “white-nose syndrome.” In early 2007, Albany residents called local authorities with reports of typically nocturnal bats flying in broad daylight. “They were just dying on the landscape,” wildlife biologist Alan Hicks told the Associated Press’ Michael Hill in 2008. “They were crashing into snowbanks, crawling into woodpiles and dying.” At last, scientists identified a culprit: The bats had succumbed to an infection caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Since its initial discovery, white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats across 40 U.S. states and nine Canadian provinces, making it “the most dramatic wildlife mortality event that’s ever been documented from a pathogen,” DeeAnn Reeder, a disease ecologist at Bucknell University, tells the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer. Now, nearly two decades later, scientists have developed some promising ways to fend off the disease, including an experimental vaccine. But a new study published this week in the journal Nature warns of a newly discovered second species of fungus that, if it reaches North America, could set all that progress back. “We thought we knew our enemy, but we have now discovered it is twice the size and potentially more complex than we had imagined,” lead author Nicola Fischer, a biologist at the University of Greifswald in Germany, says in a statement. Little brown bats are susceptible to white-nose syndrome in North America. Krynak Tim, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service The team analyzed 5,479 fungus samples collected by hundreds of citizen science volunteers across North America, Asia and Europe. They found that white-nose syndrome is caused by two distinct fungal species native to Europe and Asia, with only one species having reached North America so far. If the second species hits the continent, it could look like a “reboot” of the epidemic, Reeder tells the New York Times. Study co-author Sébastien Puechmaille, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montpellier in France, knew bats in Europe had also been seen with white fuzz on their noses, as he tells the New York Times. But those populations didn’t die off like American bats. Charting the disease across Europe and Asia, he noticed that the fungus was able to live alongside those bats, while it ravaged American ones. In its native range, the fungus grows in the bodies of hibernating bats as their internal temperature drops, then it’s shed in the spring when they awaken. But in American bats, the fungus causes their immune systems to activate and burn fat reserves as they hibernate. The bats then wake up periodically, causing irregular activity and eventual starvation. The researchers suggest the damaging fungal spores were first brought to North America by cavers that traveled from Europe—potentially western Ukraine—to the United States without completely disinfecting their boots or rope. White-nose syndrome poses a threat not just to bats, but to whole ecosystems. Bats are vital parts of many food chains, eating insects and pollinating plants. However, they reproduce fairly slowly, only having one or two pups at a time. Rebuilding a bat population, then, could take decades. And since cave ecosystems are similarly delicate, biologists are wary of trying to kill off the fungus preemptively. “Cave ecosystems are so fragile that if you start pulling on this thread, what else are you going to unravel that may create bigger problems in the cave system?” said University of Wisconsin–Madison wildlife specialist David Drake to the Badger Herald’s Kiran Mistry in December. The discovery also occurs as the original wave of white-nose syndrome continues to spread across North America, having just crossed the Continental Divide in Colorado. Just one spore of the new species could be devastating to American bat colonies. Puechmaille tells the New York Times that policies should be put in place to make sure the second fungus does not spread to more continents, and that cavers should not move equipment between countries and should disinfect it regularly. “This work … powerfully illustrates the profound impact a single translocation event can have on wildlife,” he adds in the statement. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

In Unity 2021 LTS, UI Toolkit offers a collection of features, resources, and tools to help you build and debug adaptive runtime UIs on a wide range of game applications and Editor extensions. Its intuitive workflow enables Unity creators in different roles – artists, programmers, and designers alike – to get started with UI development as quickly as possible.See our earlier blog post for an explanation of UI Toolkit’s main benefits, such as enhanced scalability and performance, already being leveraged by studios like Mechanistry for their game, Timberborn.While Unity UI remains the go-to solution for positioning and lighting UI in a 3D world or integrating with other Unity systems, UI Toolkit for runtime UI can already benefit game productions seeking performance and scalability as of Unity 2021 LTS. It’s particularly effective for Screen Space – Overlay UI, and scales well on a variety of screen resolutions.That’s why we’re excited to announce two new learning resources to better support UI development with UI Toolkit:UI Toolkit sample – Dragon Crashers: The demo is now available to download for free from the Asset Store.User interface design and implementation in Unity: This free e-book can be download from hereRead on to learn about some key features part of the UI Toolkit sample project.The UI Toolkit sample demonstrates how you can leverage UI Toolkit for your own applications. This demo involves a full-featured interface over a slice of the 2D project Dragon Crashers, a mini RPG, using the Unity 2021 LTS UI Toolkit workflow at runtime.Some of the actions illustrated in the sample project show you how to:Style with selectors in Unity style sheet (USS) files and use UXML templatesCreate custom controls, such as a circular meter or tabbed viewsCustomize the appearance of elements like sliders and toggle buttonsUse Render Texture for UI overlay effects, USS animations, seasonal themes, and moreTo try out the project after adding it to your assets, enter Play mode. Please note that UI Toolkit interfaces do not appear in the Scene view. Instead, you can view them in the Game view or UI Builder.The menu on the left helps you navigate the modal main menu screens. This vertical column of buttons provides access to the five modal screens that comprise the main menu (they stay active while switching between screens).While some interactivity is possible, such as healing the characters by dragging available potions in the scene, gameplay has been kept to a minimum to ensure continued focus on the UI examples.Let’s take a closer look at the UIs in the menu bar:The home screen serves as a landing pad when launching the application. You can use this screen to play the game or receive simulated chat messages.The character screen involves a mix of GameObjects and UI elements. This is where you can explore each of the four Dragon Crashers characters. Use the stats, skills, and bio tabs to read the specific character details, and click on the inventory slots to add or remove items. The preview area shows a 2D lit and rigged character over a tiled background.The resources screen links to documentation, the forum, and other resources for making the most of UI Toolkit.The shop screen simulates an in-game store where you can purchase hard and soft currency, such as gold or gems, as well as virtual goods like healing potions. Each item in the shop screen is a separate VisualTreeAsset. UI Toolkit instantiates these assets at runtime; one for each ScriptableObject in the Resources/GameData.The mail screen is a front-end reader of fictitious messages that uses a tabbed menu to separate the inbox and deleted messages.The game screen is a mini version of the Dragon Crashers project that starts playing automatically. In this project, you’ll notice a few revised elements with UI Toolkit, such as a pause button, health bars, and the capacity to drag a healing potion element to your characters when they take damage.UI Toolkit enables you to build stable and consistent UIs for your entire project. At the same time, it provides flexible tools for adding your own design flourishes and details to further flesh out the game’s theme and style.Let’s go over some of the features used to refine the UI designs in the sample:Render Textures:UI Toolkit interfaces are rendered last in the render queue, meaning you can’t overlay other game graphics on top of a UI Toolkit UI. Render Textures provide a workaround to this limitation, making it possible to integrate in-game effects into UI Toolkit UIs. While these effects based on Render Textures should be used sparingly, you’ll still be able to afford sharp effects within the context of a fullscreen UI, without running gameplay. The following images show a number of Render Textures from the demo.Themes with Theme style sheets (TSS): TSS files are Asset files that are similar to regular USS files. They serve as a starting point for defining your own custom theme via USS selectors as well as property and variable settings. In the demo, we duplicated the default theme files and modified the copies to offer seasonal variations.Custom UI elements: Since designers are trained to think outside the box, UI Toolkit gives you plenty of room to customize or extend the standard library. The demo project highlights a few custom-built elements in the tabbed menus, slide toggles, and drop-down lists, plus a radial counter to demonstrate what UI artists are capable of alongside developers.USS transitions for animated UI state changes: Adding transitions to the menu screens can polish and smooth out your visuals. UI Toolkit makes this more straightforward with the Transition Animations property, part of the UI Builder’s Inspector. Adjust the Property, Duration, Easing, and Delay properties to set up the animation. Then simply change styles for UI Toolkit to apply the animated transition at runtime.Post-processing volume for a background blur: A popular effect in games is to blur a crowded gameplay scene to draw the player’s attention to a particular pop-up message or dialog window. You can achieve this effect by enabling Depth of Field in the Volume framework (available in the Universal Render Pipeline).We made sure that efficient workflows were used to fortify the UI. Here are a few recommendations for keeping the project well-organized:Consistent naming conventions: It’s important to adopt naming conventions that align with your visual elements and style sheets. Clear naming conventions not only maintain the hierarchy’s organization in UI Builder, they make it more accessible to your teammates, and keep the code clean and readable. More specifically, we suggest the Block Element Modifier (BEM) naming convention for visual elements and style sheets. Just at a glance, an element’s BEM naming can tell you what it does, how it appears, and how it relates to the other elements around it. See the following BEM naming examples:Responsive UI layout: Similar to web technologies, UI Toolkit offers the possibility of creating layouts where “child” visual elements adapt to the current available size inside their “parent” visual elements, and others where each element has an absolute position anchored to a reference point, akin to the Unity UI system. The sample uses both options as needed through the visual elements of the UI.PSD Importer: One of the most effective tools for creating the demo, PSD Importer allows artists to work in a master document without having to manually export every sprite separately. When changes are needed, they can be done in the original PSD file and updated automatically in Unity.ScriptableObjects: In order to focus on UI design and implementation, the sample project simulates backend data, such as in-app purchases and mail messages, using ScriptableObjects. You can conveniently customize this stand-in data from the Resources/GameData folder and use the example to create similar data assets, like inventory items and character or dialog data in UI Toolkit.Remember that with UI Toolkit, UI layouts and styles are decoupled from code. This means that rewriting the backend data can occur independently from the UI design. If your development team replaces those systems, the interface should continue to work.Additional tools used in the demo include particle systems created with the Built-in Particle System for special effects, and the 2D toolset, among others. Feel free to review the project via the Inspector to see how these different elements come into play.You can find reference art made by the UI artists under UI/Reference, as replicated in UI Builder. The whole process, from mockups to wireframes, is also documented in the e-book. Finally, all of the content in the sample can be added to your own Unity project.You can download the UI Toolkit sample – Dragon Crashers from the Asset Store. Once you’ve explored its different UI designs, please provide your feedback on the forum.Then be sure to check out our e-book, User interface design and implementation in Unity. Download