lolwat? Daily Briefing

Good morning. I'm Mica Finch. It's Thursday, October 1, and this is your lol what dot net morning briefing. Switzerland's glaciers have lost more than five percent of their ice volume in the latest annual assessment. The report released today by the Swiss glacier monitoring network and the Swiss Academy of Sciences follows a winter with too little snow and a summer of record temperatures. Reuters reports that almost a fifth of the country's glacier ice has gone over the past five years. The consequence reaches beyond the mountain landscape. Melting ice helps supply rivers when rain and seasonal snow are scarce, but that water comes out of a shrinking reserve. A study published in January examined eighty-eight Swiss river catchments during the drought of twenty twenty-two. Researchers found that extra glacier melt could offset substantial shortages of rain and snowmelt in some mountain catchments. Yet in two thirds of the catchments studied, total summer glacier meltwater was lower than during the comparable hot summer of two thousand three, despite more intense melting. Smaller glaciers can release less water even when each remaining patch melts faster. That explains the apparent paradox in today's report: extra melt can ease a summer shortage while reducing the ice available to buffer a later one.

Next, let's look at flooding in the United States. In its Wednesday night assessment, the Weather Prediction Center forecast further heavy rain across parts of the Southern and Central Plains. For Thursday, it placed the greatest flash flood risk in Texas and southern Oklahoma, where a front is expected to stall. It said repeated thunderstorms over the same areas could increase rainfall totals, while ground already saturated by earlier rain could send more water into streams and streets. Preliminary totals for the multiday storm included more than five inches at some gauges in Arizona, Kansas and Texas. Those are accumulated totals, rather than a measure of how fast rain was falling at any particular moment. In New Mexico, Doña Ana County lifted its evacuation order for Rincon on Wednesday morning after officials determined that the major flooding risk had subsided. The county still reported debris, damaged roads and other hazards. Hurricane Polo had dissipated over northwestern Mexico on Tuesday night; its final hurricane centre advisory warned that leftover moisture could still produce heavy rain. A storm's wind strength and its rainfall effects need separate attention. For people in affected areas, local official notices remain the practical guide. Follow our live desk at lol what dot net for verified updates.

Turning to trade, a federal court in New York heard arguments Wednesday over President Donald Trump's tariffs. The administration imposed them in July under Section three oh one of the Trade Act, saying trading partners had failed to impose and effectively enforce bans on imports made with forced labour. Small businesses and twenty-five states are challenging the action. Their lawyers argue that the government failed to make the country-specific findings the law requires. The Justice Department says those investigations were conducted and support the duties. Reuters reports that judges questioned both sides about the detail needed to establish a burden on American commerce. The law permits tariffs in response to certain foreign trade practices that are unreasonable or discriminatory and burden U.S. commerce. America also has a separate existing ban on importing goods made with forced labour. Customs guidance sets the disputed rates generally at ten or twelve and a half percent, with exemptions and special treatment for some products and partners. For a simple illustration, a ten percent duty on a hundred dollars of import value means ten dollars in duty. U.S. regulations place that payment obligation on the importer. Federal Reserve research on twenty twenty-five found tariff-related price increases developed gradually in the retail goods it tracked. The courtroom dispute therefore matters both for the limits of trade authority and for businesses planning their costs.

Now, to technology with a very practical purpose: helping emergency crews communicate across European borders. The European Commission proposed a new critical communication system on Wednesday, intended to give first responders secure, resilient channels for coordinating their work. The Commission says national systems are currently incompatible and insufficiently connected. The preparation programme describes a more varied picture, with only a few countries having established cross-border links and many older systems limited to voice and short messages. The practical goal is easy to picture. Firefighters or rescue teams arriving from a neighbouring country should be able to exchange information with the local crews, including richer material such as video. Achieving that involves shared procedures as well as compatible equipment: teams need to agree how they join a network and work together. The preparation programme sets out trials of mobile broadband technology and operating procedures, with a goal of a European system by twenty thirty. That is a development target. Wednesday's proposal does not establish that the full service is available today. For the public, the potential benefit is clearer coordination when assistance crosses a border, provided the technical and operational work succeeds.

Moving to the Mediterranean, the Copernicus Ocean State Report, released Wednesday, documents exceptional marine heatwaves in twenty twenty-four. Copernicus says that year had the highest number of Mediterranean marine heatwave days in two decades, with the most extreme conditions in the eastern basin. Its wider scientific lesson is about looking beneath the surface. A study in the report compares surface temperatures with heat stored in the upper forty metres of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. It finds that surface and subsurface measures often agree, but summer events can show weaker agreement. In the Black Sea, some underwater heat events escape surface-based measures, with circulation patterns appearing to influence where the warmth sits. The researchers used reconstructed ocean conditions, combining models with observations, to examine changes through time. A marine heatwave is a sustained spell of unusually warm water relative to historical conditions. The definition and comparison period affect which events get counted. For fisheries, aquaculture and marine ecosystems, depth matters because organisms experience the water around them. Combining surface and subsurface indicators gives researchers a fuller picture of that exposure, including warmth that a surface temperature map may miss.

And before we go, a butterfly discovery gives those striking wings another possible job. Research published in Nature on Wednesday suggests that wing patterns and flapping movements work together to create misleading impressions of speed and direction. Researchers filmed butterfly take-offs at a thousand frames a second, then compared the natural patterns with digitally altered, unpatterned versions. Models based on how vision detects motion found stronger misleading signals from the patterned wings. The team also simulated flight across nearly four hundred European butterfly species and tested predictions with a hundred human volunteers trying to tap moving butterflies on a screen. Patterns predicted to produce greater confusion tended to draw attempts farther behind the virtual butterfly. The proposed explanation involves the relationship between a moving body and its moving wings: a wing can sweep in a different direction from the animal's overall travel, giving a visual system competing clues. The human experiment supports the mechanism, while its importance in encounters with wild predators remains a question. So those bright markings may help shape how a butterfly is tracked in flight. Beauty, in this case, may also be a little misleading.

I'm Mica Finch. Thanks for listening.