Negative verbal probabilities undermine communication of climate science - Nature

Saudi Arabia spent months trying to stay out of the U. S.-Israel-Iran war and convince Washington and Tehran to end the conflict. But deadly attacks by Yemen-based Houthis at Saudi airports over the weekend are pushing the kingdom’s normally cautious leadership to take more drastic military action to restore public and investor confidence in Saudi security, according to an analyst and palace insiders. The shift has broad implications for the region, the United States, and the kingdom’s diplomatic efforts to contain the Iran war. And it has left Saudi Arabia ramping up its own conflict in Yemen – with or without requested U. S. assistance. On Tuesday, the Saudi-led coalition intensified airstrikes against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, who control Sanaa, the capital. The turning point came on Saturday, when a Houthi cruise missile hit a passenger terminal at the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 13 travelers and airport workers and wounding more than 300 others, many of whom remain in critical condition. It was the deadliest militant attack in Saudi Arabia since the Islamic State bombing of a mosque in Qatif in 2015.

A digital illustration of a ball of electricity. (Vladlen Tian/iStock/Getty Images Plus) When you picture lightning, it tends to be fairly straightforward – a jagged gash of light that splits the sky, disappearing in less time than it takes to blink. But for centuries, a strange picture of a more eerie form has emerged. Thousands of records and eyewitness accounts have told of balls of lightning hovering above the ground before disappearing in a pop like soap bubbles. This fleeting phenomenon is all but impossible to study – and reports vary wildly in descriptions of its size, its hue, and even its behavior, making it one of the most peculiar mysteries in atmospheric science. But if you can't catch ball lightning in a field, physicist Chuliang Zhou and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reasoned, maybe we can learn more by reproducing something like it in a lab. "Here we report the first controlled generation of a macroscopic, long-lived soliton driven by relativistic terahertz electromagnetic fields," the researchers write in a paper published in Nature Photonics.

Mercury ends its prograde motion and prepares to enter retrograde in Libra the Balance — spot it after sunset if you’re quick. Mercury hangs just 1° above the western horizon half an hour after sunset on October 24. Look for the stars of Scorpius in the southwest to help guide you toward the planet’s position. Credit: Stellarium