The method, called Extreme Event Aware, or “η-learning”, does not need previous extreme events to create these scenarios. (Representational AP photo) What would a once-in-a-century storm look like if it was stronger than anything recorded before? Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a machine-learning method that can generate realistic scenarios for…

Beneath every footstep lies a world most of us will never see. A single teaspoon of soil, scooped from a healthy forest floor, holds more living organisms than there are humans on the planet, bacteria, fungi, protists and nematodes packed together in numbers that barely make sense on a human scale. Stranger still, the vast…