When a hail storm moved through Fort Worth, Texas on May 5, 1995, it battered the highly populated area with hail up to 4 inches in diameter and struck a local outdoor festival known as the Fort Worth Mayfest.

The Mayfest storm was one of the costliest hailstorms in U.S history, causing more than $2 billion in damage and injuring at least 100 people.

Scientists know that storms with a rotating updraft on their southwestern sides -- which are particularly common in the spring on the U.S. southern plains -- are associated with the biggest, most severe tornadoes and also produce a lot of large hail. However, clear ideas on how they form and how to predict these events in advance have proven elusive.

Whether taking photos recreationally or professionally, photographers understandably want their snapshots to appear sharp and clear. Image clarity is dependent on exposure time, or the amount of time that a camera's sensor is exposed to light while a photograph is being taken. During this period, the shutter opens and the camera counts the number of photons emitted by the subject.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- With record-breaking speeds for fiber-optic data transmission, University of Illinois engineers have paved a fast lane on the information superhighway -- creating on-ramps for big data in the process.

Graduate researcher Michael Liu will present the research team's developments in oxide-VCSEL technology, which underpins fiber-optic communications systems, at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition today in Anaheim, California. The research team was led by electrical and computer engineering professor Milton Feng -- who will be in attendance at the conference -- and also included professor emeritus Nick Holonyak Jr. and graduate researcher Curtis Wang.

Technically it also creates a diboson final state - two photons - but no, here I am not going to talk about the tentative new particle of which ATLAS and CMS continue to see hints in their data, at a mass of 750 GeV and with characteristics that increasingly resemble those of a heavy higgs boson. Oh, see - I am doing precisely that. It is admittedly hard not to speak of that thing nowadays, but I will insist, as I think it is too good to be true, and so it must be false. 

A study finds that the brains of young adult marijuana users react differently to social exclusion than do those of non-users.  Activation of the insula, a region of the brain that is usually active during social rejection, was reduced in young marijuana users when they were being excluded from participation in virtual game of catch. 

You may have heard of crows, magpies, and mockingbirds recognizing individual people. These birds live among people, so it may be natural that they learn to differentiate people. But what about the animals that live in remote areas?

Scientists in South Korea studied brown skuas living in Antarctica and reported that these birds too recognize people who had previously accessed the nests to measure their eggs and nestlings. "I had to defend myself against the skuas' attack," says Yeong-Deok Han, a PhD student at Inha University. "When I was with other researchers, the birds flew over me and tried to hit me. Even when I changed my field clothes, they followed me. The birds seemed to know me no matter what I wear."

At least half of Parkinson's disease patients experience psychosis at some point during the course of their illness, and physicians commonly prescribe antipsychotic drugs, such as quetiapine, to treat the condition. However, a new study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan Medical School, and the Philadelphia and Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centers and suggests that these drugs may do significantly more harm in a subset of patients. The findings will be published in the March 21, 2016 issue of JAMA Neurology.

Leonard: "The holographic principle suggests that what we all experience every day in three dimensions may really just be information on a surface located at the farthest reaches of our cosmos. So it's possible that our lives are really just acting out a painting on the largest canvas in the universe." 
Penny: "Hmmm..."

Is our universe holographic? Is what is happening in the universe somehow encoded on its boundary? Are we 3D renderings of some distant 2D image? Black hole physics certainly suggests so. But how does such an encoding work? Can we visualize a system that "just acts out" a painting on its boundary?

ITHACA, N.Y. - According to a recent study, the size of a common ground-nesting bee - an important crop pollinator - has grown smaller in heavily farmed landscapes.

The link between intensive agriculture and the size of Andrena nasonii bees has important implications for how farmers might diversify these landscapes to benefit bees. It also points out yet another potential threat to pollinators, along with mites, pesticides and loss of habitat.