drones help

It’s been four days since a winter storm pounded Virginia with up to 11 inches of snow and left tens of thousands of residents without power. Crews at utility company Dominion Energy have been working tirelessly ever since to ensure a swift response to the outages. But with heavy, wet snow knocking down trees and making some areas especially inaccessible by road, drones have played a critical role in giving linemen a head-start on understanding what they’re dealing with.

An interdisciplinary research team from the University of New Mexico (UNM) has become one of the first in the world to sample uncontaminated gases from an active volcanic eruption. The data – a treasure trove that can help to predict when a volcano will erupt – were collected during the recent spewing of the Cumbre Vieja volcano at La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands.

The home of the Gunas is what you’d call “a paradise on earth”. The tiny coconut islands of the San Blas archipelago off Panama’s eastern coast are littered with glistening white sand beaches, palm trees, and thatch-roof huts. And even though the indigenous tribes have maintained a healthy distance from unwanted modernization, the ripple effects of climate change have reached their shores.