A daily briefing on how to recover from an extreme weather event

Nature Podcast – Making Sense of the Brasilian Outburst in the aftermath of the Brazilian Floods: How the American voter may feel about the election

In the aftermath of floods in the South of Brazil, researchers are trying to find ways to help people while Nature readers are worried about the US election.

More than half of the people who took the Nature survey are from outside the United States, and most think the election will impact everything from climate change to public health. Respondents overwhelmingly favour Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, and one-third of the researchers rooting for her said it might affect their plans for where they live or study if the Republican candidate Donald Trump wins next week. The people who wrote the responses said that a country that doesn’t believe in facts is not a good place to build a career in science.

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The Lunar Landing Area for the Artemis III Mission: Discovery of a Hidden Maya City in Campeche with LiDAR

Reforms introduced by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) to support young scientists to get research funding might actually be making it more difficult. The funding for many of the programs is provided by competitive grants, which are overseen by the NSFC in Beijing. The reforms scrapped a rule whereby applicants who had been rejected for two consecutive years had to sit a year out before applying again. More than 385,000 applications were submitted this year, but only a little over half of them were successful. Cong Cao, a science policy researcher says that the competition is very intense.

There are nine possible landing areas for NASA’s upcoming Artemis III mission, which will be the first crewed moon landing in 42 years. The regions are all near the lunar South Pole, an area of the Moon that has never been explored. The selection criteria included terrain suitability, lighting conditions and communication capabilities. “The Moon’s South Pole is a completely different environment than where we landed during the Apollo missions,” says Sarah Noble, Artemis lunar science lead. “It offers access to some of the Moon’s oldest terrain, as well as cold, shadowed regions that may contain water and other compounds.”

There is an ancient Maya city hidden under the jungle canopy in the Mexican state of Campeche. Archaeologists used a laser technique called LiDAR to scan the area, “accidentally” discovering the forgotten complex, which contains pyramids, amphitheatres and sports fields. They think the site, which they’ve named Valeriana, might have housed up to 50,000 people, which supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages, says archaeologist Elizabeth Graham.

Studies done after recent floods in Brazil show how to help people cope with mental-health challenges caused by climate disasters. Plus, laser technology has uncovered a hidden Maya city in the Mexican jungle.

Source: Daily briefing: How to mentally recover from an extreme weather event

A Conversation with Natalia Kucirkova on the Role of Educational Apps in Children’s Learning: From Physics to Artificial Intelligence

In the last year, more than 60 countries have banned the use of cellphones in schools because of fears that social media can affect children’s mental health. Natalia Kucirkova, Director of the International Centre for EdTech Impact, doesn’t want to see educational technology (edtech) caught in the crossfire. She knows that educational apps can help children learn in low-income areas. However, any apps marketed as ‘educational’ must be able to back that claim with evidence, which researchers and developers should work together to gather, to avoid disrupting proper learning.

The Hopfield network is an important building block of machine learning, which underpins modern artificial intelligence. He jumped from physics to chemistry and biology over the course of his career and spoke to Nature about how knowledge from one discipline can help you approach another from a new angle, whether it was really physics or not.