Typically, it takes seasons for a standard drought to develop — with a flash drought, however, expedited drying arises in just weeks. Thus, it’s quite difficult to prepare for them. However, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California may have a solution. At the end of April, they released a study about their discovery of a way to recognize signs months in advance of a flash drought event. Signs from space, that is. You just have to look for the glow — or, well, lack thereof. It would appear that, in anticipation of a flash drought, the “glow” of a plant begins to dim, and it’s possible to capture such dimming with spacecraft orbiting our planet.
— “Plants signal NASA satellites with waning ‘glow’ ahead of flash drought,” Space.com
A Skeptic’s View of the President’s Actions
In January, I tried to track Trump’s executive actions, but a handy website beat me to it. But with a new authoritarian at the helm, banal summaries don’t cut it. So now I’ve set up a ChatGPT task to do the heavy lifting: provide a brief analysis of each week’s presidential orders from a radical left perspective. No blind trust, no propaganda—just a bullshit detector for the modern age.