science

Outdated lightning safety advice is making the rounds again, prompting experts to speak up about what actually keeps you safe in a storm.

If you get caught outdoors during a lightning storm, safety experts once recommended adopting a crouched position to lessen your chances of being struck by lightning. It turns out, however, that the position doesn’t make you any safer.

“If you’re caught outside during a thunderstorm, the best plan of action is to move as fast as you can to a safer place,” John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the NLSC, said in a statement released by Loehr Lightning Protection Co. “The sooner you get to a safe place, the lower your risk. Crouching only prolongs the risk of being struck,” explained Jensenius.

The crouch isn’t just outdated—it was debunked almost 20 years ago. But despite the fact that the NLSC and the National Weather Service stopped recommending the crouch in 2008, institutions such as the American Hiking Society and the city of Bellmead in Texas continue to include it in their lightning safety guidelines.

cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5558928

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/science by /u/mvea on 2025-04-03 10:04:48+00:00.

Original Title: Study found that people who were not married were less at risk (at least 50% lower risk) than married people for dementia. One contributing factor may be that single people are better at maintaining social ties. Single people may also have a greater variety of interesting and unique experiences.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have developed an innovative method to study ultrafast magnetism in materials. They have shown the generation and application of magnetic field steps, in which a magnetic field is turned on in a matter of picoseconds.

Penrose for the win!

Maybe you guys have heard of recent news mentioning how the wealthiest Americans live shorter than the poorest Western Europeans. This is the base study that supported that claim.

We performed a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age who were included in the Health and Retirement Study and the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe between 2010 and 2022. Wealth quartiles were defined according to age group and country, with quartile 1 comprising the poorest participants and quartile 4 the wealthiest. Mortality and Kaplan–Meier curves were estimated for each wealth quartile across the United States and 16 countries in northern and western, southern, and eastern Europe...

... Although all the countries showed an association between wealth and mortality, the United States had the widest gap in mortality between the bottom and top wealth quartiles. Mortality among the wealthiest Americans appeared to be higher than that among most northern and western Europeans and the wealthiest southern Europeans and similar to that among the poorest northern and western Europeans and most eastern Europeans. The poorest Americans appeared to have the lowest survival among all wealth groups in the study sample. U.S. regional differences in mortality were minimal, except for the finding of lower mortality among the wealthiest participants in western states than among the wealthiest participants in the other U.S. Census regions.

The DOI link doesn't seem to be working quite yet.

An artificial intelligence (AI) system has for the first time figured out how to collect diamonds in the hugely popular video game Minecraft — a difficult task requiring multiple steps — without being shown how to play. Its creators say the system, called Dreamer, is a step towards machines that can generalize knowledge learned in one domain to new situations, a major goal of AI.

Collecting a diamond is “a very hard task”, says computer scientist Jeff Clune at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was part of a separate team that trained a program to find diamonds using videos of human play. “There is no question this represents a major step forward for the field.”

An even bigger target for AI, says Clune, is the ultimate challenge for Minecraft players: killing the Ender Dragon, the virtual world’s most fearsome creature.

The associated preprint

Associated blog post

~~Neuro-sama: finally a worthwhile opponent~~

Scientists at the world’s largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could help solve remaining enigmas of physics.

The plans for the Future Circular Collider — a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and even below Lake Geneva — published late on Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Scientists have long sought to unravel the mysteries of strange metals — materials that defy conventional rules of electricity and magnetism. Now, a team of physicists at Rice University has made a breakthrough in this area using a tool from quantum information science. Their study, published recently in Nature Communications, reveals that electrons in strange metals become more entangled at a crucial tipping point, shedding new light on the behavior of these enigmatic materials. The discovery could pave the way for advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use in the future.