Influence of the Rio Grande do Sul Disaster on Mental Health and Public Health: Implications for Climate Change, Public Health, and Science Policy

More than 2 million people were affected by devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, earlier this year. The state was hit by a combination of heavy rains and infrastructure failures that left half a million people displaced. Extreme weather events leave lasting damage to people’s mental health, along with their homes and possessions. Lessons have begun to emerge from studies conducted immediately after the Rio Grande do Sul disaster, including how community members can support each other during the initial response to prevent trauma, as research on how to help people facing mental-health challenges in the wake of these disasters is scarce.

Most of the people who took the survey think the US election can have big implications on everything from climate change to public health and science policy. The majority of respondents who were in favor of the Democratic candidate said it would affect their lives, while only a third of those who were against the Democratic candidate said it would affect their lives. A country that doesn’t believe in facts is a bad place to start a career in science.

Tune in to the Nature Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or RSS Feed. What happens when scientists are funding a weather event?

Don’t forget to watch an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on

  Apple Podcasts



,



  Spotify



,



  YouTube Music



 or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for Nature is also available.

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. Several of the programmes that provide funding through competitive grants are overseen by the NSFC in Beijing. There used to be a rule that applicants had to sit out a year after they were rejected for two years before applying again. Almost 360,000 applications were made this year, but only a small percentage of them were successful. “The competition is very, very intense,” says Cong Cao, a science-policy researcher.

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

A Hidden Maya City in the Mexican Jungle: a case study of a hidden Maya city in Campeche, South Pole of the Moon

NASA has identified nine potential landing regions for its upcoming Artemis III mission, the first crewed Moon landing since 1972. The South Pole is the area of the Moon that has never been explored. Selection criteria included terrain suitability, lighting conditions and communication capabilities with Earth. The South Pole of the Moon is different from where Artemis scientists landed during the Apollo missions. “It offers access to some of the Moon’s oldest terrain, as well as cold, shadowed regions that may contain water and other compounds.”

An ancient Maya city has been found “hidden in plain sight” beneath the jungle canopy in the Mexican state of Campeche. The complex of pyramids, amphitheatres and sports fields was accidentally found by archaeologists using a laser technique. 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.

Lessons can be learned from studies that were done after the recent floods in Brazil. There is a hidden Maya city in the Mexican jungle.

The use of mobile devices in school has been banned in 60 countries because of concerns over the impact of social media on children’s mental health. Director of the International Centre for Edtech Impact, Natalia Kucirkova does not want to see educational technology caught in the crossfire. She knows that educational apps can help children 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.

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

John Hopfield: From physics to AI, and why we should worry about AI in the early 21st century – A Conversation with Nature

John Hopfield shared the Nobel Prize in Physics this year for his work on the ‘Hopfield network’, a building block of machine learning, which that underpins modern artificial intelligence (AI). Now aged 91, Hopfield, who has jumped from physics to chemistry to biology over the course of his career, spoke to Nature about how knowledge from one discipline can help you approach another from a new angle, whether his prizewinning work was really physics and why we should worry about AI.