Flow State Isn't Just Slang — Scientists Say It's Real : The Science Behind Reaching Flow state - Yale Daily News

Published 2 days ago • loading... • Updated 5 hours agoThe report says 7 of 16 planetary vital signs are at record extremes, while renewable energy growth is still not reducing fossil fuel use fast enough. On Wednesday, researchers published a report in BioScience indicating Earth is undergoing "rapid destabilization," with seven of 16 tracked "planetary vital signs" reaching "record extremes. "Humanity continues relying on fossil fuels as the dominant energy source, pushing atmospheric carbon dioxide 50 percent higher than preindustrial levels and accelerating warming to 0.36 degrees Celsius per decade since 2010. Scientists warn accelerating trends raise the risk of Earth breaching "tipping points," such as mass coral die-offs if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius or Amazon forest degradation. Since September 2025, humans have faced immediate danger from widespread climate-fueled disasters, including heatwaves in Europe, India, and Florida, plus wildfires in Australia.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this view looking back at the floor of Gale Crater, with the crater’s rim visible in the distance, on Sept. 5, 2026, the 5,006th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Just nine days prior, on Aug. 26 (Sol 4,996), Curiosity set a mission milestone by reaching 1 kilometer of elevation above the crater floor. Since 2014, Curiosity has been climbing the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain located within Gale Crater. A sand ridge extends across the foreground of the image, and a trench left by the rover’s right front wheel is visible at right. Geologic layering inside the ridge, as well as the size and composition of its sand grains, will provide clues to how the feature formed.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.