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Tag: desert

  • How 3 Nobel Prize Winners’ Could Make ‘Dune’ Tech a Reality

    STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for their development of new molecular structures that can trap vast quantities of gas inside, laying the groundwork to potentially suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or harvest moisture from desert environments.

    The chairperson of the committee that made the award compared the structures called metal-organic frameworks to the seemingly bottomless magical handbag carried by Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” series. Another example might be Mary Poppins’ enchanted carpet bag. These containers look small from the outside but are able to hold surprisingly large quantities within.

    The committee said Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi were honored for “groundbreaking discoveries” that “may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges,” from pollution to water scarcity.

    Robson, 88, is affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia. Kitagawa, 74, is with Japan’s Kyoto University, and Yaghi, 60, is with the University of California, Berkeley.

    The work that won the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry

    The chemists worked separately but added to each other’s breakthroughs over decades, beginning with Robson’s work in the 1980s.

    The scientists were able to devise stable atomic structures that preserved holes of specific sizes that allowed gas or liquid to flow in and out. The holes can be customized to match the size of specific molecules that scientists or engineers want to hold in place, such as water, carbon dioxide or methane.

    “That level of control is quite rare in chemistry,” said Kim Jelfs, a computational chemist at Imperial College London. “It’s really efficient for storing gases.”

    A relatively small amount of the structure — which combines metal nodes and organic rods, somewhat like the interchangeable building pieces in Tinker Toys — creates many organized holes and a huge amount of surface area inside.
    For instance, Jelfs said, a few grams of molecular organic framework may have as much surface area as a soccer field, all of which can be used to lock gas molecules in place.

    “If you can store toxic gases,” said American Chemical Society President Dorothy Phillips, “it can help address global challenges.”

    Why the work matters

    Today researchers around the world are exploring possibilities that include using the frameworks to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and pollution from industrial sites. Another possibility is to use them to harvest moisture from desert air, perhaps to one day provide clean drinking water in arid environments.
    Scientists are also investigating using the structures for targeted drug delivery. The idea is to load them with medicine that may be slowly released inside the body.

    “It could be a better way to deliver low doses continually,” as with cancer drugs, said David Pugh, a chemist at King’s College London.

    The research “could be really, really valuable” in many industries, he said. But “there are still challenges when you translate that from the lab to the real world.” For example, many of the structures store the most gas and liquid in very low-temperature, high-pressure environments, he said.

    Today, metal-organic frameworks are already being used in some surprising ways, including as part of packing material to keep fruit fresh over long shipping routes, by gradually releasing chemicals that slow down the ripening process.

    The winners’ reactions

    Yaghi learned that he had won while traveling from San Francisco to Brussels. As he grabbed his luggage and prepared to change flights in Frankfurt, his phone started buzzing with a call from Sweden.

    “You cannot prepare for a moment like that,” he said at a news conference. “The feeling is indescribable, but it’s absolutely thrilling.”

    When his phone rang, Kitagawa was at first skeptical. He said he answered “rather bluntly,” thinking it must be a telemarketing call.

    “It was such a big prize so I thought, ‘Is it really true?’” he recalled during a news conference at Kyoto University. “When one of the experts came on the phone and congratulated me, I finally thought it was real and felt relaxed.”

    Kitagawa said the research has been widely recognized in the world of chemistry, but “it is very difficult to gain understanding by the ordinary people, and I’m delighted to be recognized.”

    The 88-year-old Robson, in a phone call with The Associated Press from his home in Melbourne, Australia, said he was “very pleased of course and a bit stunned as well.”
    “This is a major thing that happens late in life when I’m not really in a condition to withstand it all,” he said. “But here we are.”

    Nobel history and other 2025 prizes

    The 2024 chemistry prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

    The three were awarded for discovering powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins, the building blocks of life. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and held the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made.

    The first Nobel of 2025 was announced Monday. The prize in medicine went to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

    Tuesday’s physics prize went to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for their research on the weird world of subatomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

    This year’s Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics prize on Monday.

    The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

    Dazio reported from Berlin, and Larson reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, contributed to this report.

    AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

    Associated Press

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  • Piles of Human Cremains Found in Desert Outside Las Vegas – Casino.org

    Posted on: August 28, 2025, 02:14h. 

    Last updated on: August 28, 2025, 02:33h.

    • Numerous piles of cremated human remains have been found on federal land in Searchlight, Nev.
    • The piles were illegally dumped on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management
    • Authorities are investigating the source of the illegal dumping

    More than 100 piles of cremated human remains have been found in a mass gravesite an hour southeast of Las Vegas, and no one knows how they got there or who they belong to.

    A tipster allowed to remain anonymous by KLAS-TV/Las Vegas furnished these photos of the grisly scene. (Image: KLAS viewer)

    KLAS-TV/Las Vegas was alerted this week by an anonymous tipster who happened upon the grey piles of powdered and pulverized bone on the side of a highway near the town of Searchlight on July 28.

    If there was a doubt about what the piles consisted of, that doubt was shattered by a broken urn found at the scene.

    The tipster took multiple photos of the piles surrounded by cacti, desert brush, and mountains.

    The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which owns the land, confirmed that the remains are human and is investigating this as a case of illegal dumping. Las Vegas police were initially involved in the investigation, but have deferred to the BLM. The Clark County coroner’s office isn’t participating.

    Nevada law allows individual, noncommercial scattering of cremated remains for “casual use,” but BLM policy restricts funeral homes and other commercial businesses from disposing of remains on federal land.

    That distinction is now central to the federal investigation.

    No suspects have been identified.

    This news comes three weeks after Nevada revoked the license of a Las Vegas funeral home. McDermott’s allegedly allowed months to transpire — in one case, 10 of them!! — before cremating eight bodies, all of which were transferred to another funeral home.

    The funeral home’s owner, Chris Grant, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the bodies waited so long because he was still waiting for the required approvals from the Clark County Social Services Department.

    There is no reason to believe the two cases are related.

    Corey Levitan

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  • VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: Las Vegas Was Built on Barren Desert – Casino.org

    Posted on: August 22, 2025, 07:21h. 

    Last updated on: August 14, 2025, 11:31h.

    EDITOR’S NOTE: A new “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes every Monday, with a bonus Flashback Friday edition. Today’s edition originally ran on July 9, 2024.

    Las Vegas is the second driest city in the US after Yuma, Ariz., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with an average rainfall of just 5.37 inches a year. So why on Earth was a big city built in such a waterless hellscape?

    Large portions of downtown Las Vegas used to look like this. This is Stewart Ranch, circa 1905. Occupying the site of the Old Mormon Fort, its water supply came entirely from a bubbling creek fed by mountain runoff. (Image: nps.gov)

    Because it wasn’t.

    While rain barely falls on Las Vegas, it falls plenty in the mountains surrounding it. For more than 15,000 years, runoff from snowmelt and downpours at higher altitudes fed springs and streams that broke through the desert floor and flowed freely (and, during storms, uncontrollably) through Las Vegas.

    Large portions of downtown Las Vegas used to look like this. This is Stewart Ranch, circa 1905. Occupying the site of the Old Mormon Fort, its water supply came entirely from a bubbling creek fed by mountain runoff. (Image: nps.gov)

    Rather than a harsh desert, the region was actually an oasis inside a harsh desert when it was founded in 1905. (“Las Vegas” is Spanish for “The Meadows.”)

    Today, its underground aquifers are drained nearly dry and the mountain runoff is funneled into concrete flood channels that deliver it directly to Lake Mead. But when they were allowed to (and could) flow naturally, the main waterways — Las Vegas Creek, Duck Creek, and what’s known today as the Flamingo Wash — provided ample water to drink and bathe with, as well as to sustain lush grass and thickets of mesquite and willow trees that supported their own diverse array of nondesert wildlife.

    This water source allowed Native Americans to survive and thrive here for at least 5,000 years. Then it made Las Vegas a vital stop on the Old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles.

    In fact, it was while mapping that trail in 1829 that Raphael Rivera, a scout for the first Mexican expedition through Southern Nevada, bestowed upon the region its Spanish name.

    Two unidentified hunters stalk prey in an unidentified Las Vegas waterway in an undated photo. (Image: Las Vegas Springs Preserve)

    Related Bonus Myth

    The first permanent European settlement in Las Vegas wasn’t abandoned because of a lack of water. A combination of factors caused 32 Mormon missionaries to ditch the Old Mormon Fort two years after they built it on the Las Vegas Creek in 1855.

    These factors included disappointing mining and crop yields, dissension among the leaders, deteriorating relations with the Native Americans they tried converting to Mormonism, and the beginning of what the Mormons refer to as the Utah War against the US government, which they returned home to help fight.

    Troubled Water

    In 1902, Las Vegas pioneer Helen J. Stewart sold most of her ranch on Las Vegas Creek, and its water rights, to Montana Sen. William A. Clark and his San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. This allowed the railroad to build a system that pumped running water from the creek directly to the 1,200 business and residential lots it sold in what eventually became downtown Las Vegas.

    Five years later, the new city’s residents began drilling wells into the aquifer for extra water. Often, these wells weren’t capped, allowing copious amounts of the precious resource to gush aboveground where most of it evaporated. People didn’t understand where the water came from, and the force with which it gushed gave them the misconception that its supply was endless.

    By the summer of 1935, so much more of its water was pumped out than had been naturally replenished, Las Vegas Creek dried up for the first time. This prompted Nevada State Engineer Alfred Merritt Smith to declare Las Vegas dangerously overdrawn.

    An unidentified man and his pooch pose in front of a ranch house on Las Vegas Creek circa 1902. (Image: UNLV Special Collections)

    Smith proposed metering water usage, but the Nevada State Legislature opposed all such anti-development crazy talk.

    By 1962, the water table finally sank so low, the Las Vegas Springs stopped flowing to the surface entirely. This killed most of the vegetation its springs and streams had sustained, as well as several distinct species of frogs and fish.

    By 1972, the last remnant of Las Vegas Creek was doomed to be paved over for a new expressway. This remnant still quenched a green but slowly dying half-mile swath of vegetation just west of downtown and adjacent to the Meadows Mall. (Get the name? Most people don’t because there aren’t many meadows left in Las Vegas.)

    By this time, Las Vegas was drawing most of its water from the Colorado River, via pipes poked into a completely full Lake Mead, so no loud alarm bells sounded.Preserve)

    Until UNLV archeology professor Claude Warren conducted a survey that found evidence of human occupation on the site dating back thousands of years.

    One of 14 habitat ponds restored with Las Vegas Creek water by the Las Vegas Springs Preserve. (Image: Las Vegas Springs

    The Las Vegas Valley Water District, with the help of concerned citizens, used this surprise to get the Las Vegas Springs added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. And that’s what forced the Nevada Department of Transportation to divert US 95 around the 180-acre site.

    To protect, and attempt to restore, what little remains of the Las Vegas Springs, the Las Vegas Springs Preserve was established on the site in 2007.

    To date, according to the organization’s website, it has restored seven acres of wetlands, including a stream and 14 habitat ponds.

    That may be a drop in the bucket, but it beats doing nothing at all.

    Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org. Visit VegasMythsBusted.com to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org. 

    Corey Levitan

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  • Inside the windowless shipping container where analysts hunt migrants by drone

    FT. HUACHUCA, Ariz. — Inside a windowless and dark shipping container turned into a high-tech surveillance command center, two analysts peered at their own set of six screens that showed data coming in from an MQ-9 Predator B drone.

    Both were looking for two adults and a child who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and had fled when a Border Patrol agent approached in a truck.

    Inside the drone hangar on the other side of the Ft. Huachuca base sat another former shipping container, this one occupied by a drone pilot and a camera operator, who pivoted the drone’s camera to scan 9 square miles of shrubs and saguaros for the migrants. Like the command center, the onetime shipping container was lit mostly by the glow of the computer screens.

    The hunt for the three migrants embodied how advanced technology has become a vital part of the Trump administration’s efforts to secure the border.

    The Department of Homeland Security allocated 12,000 hours of MQ-9 drone flight time this year at the Ft. Huachuca base, and says the flights cost $3,800 per hour, though an inspector general report in 2015 said the amount is closer to $13,000 when factoring in personnel salaries and operational costs. Maintenance issues and bad weather often mean the drones fly around half the allotted hours, officials said.

    With the precipitous drop in migrant crossings at the southern U.S. border, the drones are now tasked with fewer missions. That means they have the time to track small groups or even individual border jumpers trekking north through the desert.

    This type of drone, first used in warfare, was operated by the National Air Security Operations division of Customs and Border Protection at the Army base about 70 miles south of Tucson. A reporter was allowed to observe the operation in April on the condition that personnel not be named and that no photographs be taken.

    An air interdiction agent, left, programs an unmanned Predator aircraft from a flight operations center near the Mexican border at Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Ariz., in March 2013.

    (John Moore / Getty Images)

    The drone flying this day was mounted with a radar, called Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar, or VaDER, that could identify any moving object in the drone’s sight, and pinpoint them with color-coded dots for the two analysts in the first container. The program had already located three Border Patrol agents, one on foot and two on motorcycles, searching for the migrants. The analysts had also identified three cows and two horses, headed toward Mexico.

    Then, one of the analysts spotted something.

    “We got them,” he said to his colleague, who had been scanning the terrain. “Good work.”

    The analyst dropped a pin on the migrants and the VaDER program began tracking their movement in a blue trail. Now, he had to guide agents on the ground to them.

    “We’ve got an adult male and a child, I think, tucked in this bush,” the analyst radioed to his team, as he toggled between the live video to an infrared camera view that showed the heat signature of every living thing in range. The analyst saw his Border Patrol colleagues approaching on motorcycles.

    The roar of the oncoming machines scared up a bird, the tracking program showed. The migrants began running.

    “OK, it looks like they’re starting,” the camera operator said into the radio to the Border Patrol agents. “They’re hearing the bikes. They hear you guys.” The camera operator and the other personnel spoke in the professional, matter-of-fact tone of 911 operators.

    One adult and the child began scrambling up a hill. “They’re moving north and west, mainly,” the camera operator said. “Starting to pick up the pace going uphill.”

    The agents rushed in on the pair and detained them. It was a mother and her child. The drone team turned its attention to the third person, who was stumbling through the brush and making a beeline for the Mexican border.

    “If you cut due south from your current location,” the drone pilot said to the camera operator. “You should pick up some sign.”

    The camera operator, as directed, panned across the desert, scanning farther and farther south.

    “I’ve got them,” he said when he spotted someone running. He radioed the coordinates to the Border Patrol team.

    By now, the man, carrying a backpack, had scaled a hill.

    “He’s on the ridgeline right now, working his way up due south, slowly,” the camera operator radioed.

    Then the man dropped something.

    “Hey, mark that spot,” the camera operator said. “He just threw a pack, right here where my crosshairs are at. ”

    Agents would go back later and see if the backpack contained drugs, an analyst said. “Usually, if it’s food or water, they’re not going to do that,” he said.

    On this spring morning, the drone wasn’t the only airborne asset deployed. A helicopter had joined the chase to catch the southbound man, who stumbled, got up and kept running.

    “He took a pretty good spill there,” an analyst said into the radio.

    “We have a helo inbound, three point five minutes out,” the camera operator said.

    A helicopter came into the drone’s view. It swooped in, circling the location of the man, who was by now hiding under a bush.

    “You just passed over him,” the camera operator radioed the helicopter pilot. “He’s between you and that saguaro.”

    With a keystroke, he switched to infrared vision to find the man’s heat profile through the brush to make sure he still had him.

    Guided by the camera operator, the pilot landed the helicopter in a cloud of dust near the cowering target. The video feed showed agents jump out of the aircraft, detain the man and load him into the helicopter. The chopper lifted off and tilted back north toward a nearby Border Patrol post. “Thanks, sir, appreciate all the help,” the analyst said to the helicopter pilot.

    Mission accomplished, the drone pilot turned the MQ-9 back along the U.S.-Mexico border, scanning the vast desert in search of more migrants. The military is planning to deliver a third MQ-9 drone to the base this fall after spending a year retrofitting it for civilian authority use.

    Fisher is a special correspondent. This article was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Steve Fisher

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  • Unbelievable facts

    Unbelievable facts

    Saudi Arabia is the only country without any permanent rivers or lakes. The nation relies on wadis…

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  • Muddled mystery of Karlie Gusé who went missing near California desert

    Muddled mystery of Karlie Gusé who went missing near California desert

    It’s been over 5 years since Karlie Gusé disappeared from her home in Chalfant Valley, California. She was 16 at the time. Karlie was born on May 13th, 2002 which would make her 22 years old today. Her story is one of mystery and intrigue that has left her family and police dumbfounded.

    By all accounts, Karlie was your everyday teenager. She had a boyfriend. She had plenty of friends. People knew who she was at school, and she was well-liked. However, things got murky during the weeks leading up to her disappearance.

    Zach

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  • Opinion: The open-air camps outside San Diego are a healthcare crisis for migrants

    Opinion: The open-air camps outside San Diego are a healthcare crisis for migrants

    An hour and a half east of San Diego in late October, surrounded by haphazard makeshift tents, an asylum seeker lies in the desert with his leg propped up. Our team of volunteer physicians and medical students learned that he sustained a serious foot injury on his perilous journey to the United States. By the look of his swollen and seeping wound, the antibiotics he has been taking for the last 10 days are not warding off infection. He’s been taking half the prescribed dose of antibiotics because he’s not sure how long he’ll be traveling and doesn’t want to run out.

    While we dress his wound, a doctor on our team steps away, motioning for the rest of us to follow. We find ourselves conflicted over the limited options, not knowing when this patient will next access medical care. Moreover, once he is transferred from this site to an official detention facility, his medications, including antibiotics, may be confiscated. After considering these factors, we all come to the same conclusion: If he does not receive proper care, this injury could cause permanent damage, or worse, a fatal blood infection. So what happens next?

    For the last two months, we have mobilized local healthcare providers to help asylum seekers in rural San Diego County. A handful of uninhabitable places around the small town of Jacumba Hot Springs have become open-air detention sites for hundreds of asylum seekers. Migrants wait in the desert to be transferred to an official detention facility for processing. While some are transported within a few hours, many spend days without consistent access to food, water or medical care, with no shelter from increasingly harsh environmental conditions.

    Migrants have been told by Border Patrol agents that if they leave the sites to seek medical care, their asylum process may be significantly delayed or endangered. Yet since Jacumba is not an official detention center, these asylum seekers are denied the basic resources and services required by Border Patrol policy for those in custody.

    We see a medical crisis unfolding. People are suffering from deep tissue infections and ulcers, acute appendicitis, seizures, heart attack symptoms and pregnancies with complications. We provide services with whatever donated supplies we can get our hands on. We wash dust-filled eyes with saline, hand out Vaseline for cracked skin and provide face masks to limit the spread of upper respiratory infections that overwhelm the sites. Plastic spoons serve as splints for broken fingers, children are examined in makeshift tents and cough drops are handed out by the hundreds.

    On any given day, volunteers in different fields are providing critical services for hundreds of migrants in Jacumba, supported by donations, mutual aid groups and nonprofit teams including Border Kindness and Al Otro Lado.

    As temperatures approach freezing and winter rains fall, we are increasingly concerned about frostbite, hypothermia and exacerbations of chronic health conditions such as asthma and diabetes. At least one preventable death has been reported at an open air site along the border. We fear that the next one could occur in Jacumba.

    International and U.S. laws recognize seeking asylum as a human right. We have a responsibility to provide safe conditions for migrants when they exercise that right.

    To ensure that no further harm is done, local, state and federal authorities need to stop utilizing loopholes, or sidestepping legal responsibility, to detain migrants in “unofficial” camps where they are experiencing dehumanizing, preventable suffering. If hundreds of people are being kept by our country at a site, that location should be acknowledged as a detention center with the obligation to meet detainees’ basic needs.

    As our day at the site comes to a close, we rejoin the migrant with the leg infection and our colleagues who have finished changing his dressing. We share our concerns and coach him through communicating with medical staff at his next destination, most likely an official detention center. A minute in, we pause — this is too much information to remember. Someone produces a marker, and one physician begins writing on the waterproof tape. She scrawls out a note to Border Patrol and instructions for the next medical team, signing her name at the bottom as she would a prescription. Right now, this is the best we can do out here.

    Sadie Munter and Karyssa Domingo are second-year medical students in San Diego, where Weena Joshi is a practicing pediatrician.

    Sadie Munter, Karyssa Domingo and Weena Joshi

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  • New species with “hieroglyphic” pattern discovered among sand dunes

    New species with “hieroglyphic” pattern discovered among sand dunes

    A brand new lizard species with a hieroglyphic pattern on its back has been discovered among the sand dunes in eastern Iran.

    The discovery, which was detailed in a study in the journal Zootaxa on November 10, was made back in 2010 in the South Khorasan province of the desert, while researchers were conducting a survey for local reptiles and amphibians.

    The researchers found a total of 10 strange-looking lizards in the sand dunes, all with an unusual pattern on their skin. They discovered that it was actually an entirely new species, now named Eremias graphica, or the “hieroglyphic racerunner lizard.”

    The new species is named using the Greek word “graphikos,” according to the study, as reported by the Miami Herald. This translates to either “drawn” or “written,” and was used because of the lizard’s strange pattern which resembles hieroglyphs.

    A photo shows the new lizard species found in the sand dunes of Iran. A closer look at the creature shows a strange pattern on its back.
    Eskandar Rasegar-Pouyani, Valentina Orlova, Khosrow Rajabizadeh, Hossein Nabizadeh, Nikolay Poyarkov, Daniel Melnikov and Roman Nazarov

    Hieroglyphs are generally associated with Ancient Egypt, though other forms of writing also exited at the time.

    The researchers found that most of the lizards were about 7 inches long and were easily disguised in the sand dunes due to their sandy coloring, according to the study.

    The researchers, who are from multiple organizations from across Russia and Iran, analyzed 93 genetic samples from the lizards in the desert.

    “We hypothesize that the diversification of the Eremias fasciata species complex was largely influenced by the fragmentation of sand massifs in the region,” an abstract from the study read. “This same hypothesis has been used to explain the high level of endemism among the sand-dwelling species of reptiles along the Iranian Plateau in the same area. The two new species described herein can be distinguished from other congeneric species by their phylogenetic position and a combination of morphological characters. We use these data to discuss the taxonomy of Eremias based on morphology, habitat choice, and genetic data.”

    The study noted that the lizards can mainly be found scuttling around the vegetation found in the sand dunes, the Miami Herald reported. They can also be found burrowing for shade and shelter. The researchers reported that they typically eat insects.

    Closer analysis of the creature showed that it was most active during some hours in the morning, and evening. During the rest of the day, it tends to hide under the bushes of the sand dunes.

    So far, the new species has only been found near one road near the city of Tabas, in central-eastern Iran.