17 MODELING Although using soap bubbles to predict the strength of hurricanes and typhoons seems a little far-fetched, this is what physicists did when studying the vortices that form on these bubbles in order to model atmospheric flow. This enabled them to obtain a simple model that can predict the intensity of tropical cyclones. Nature Scientific Reports December 2013 CLIMATE Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming. It is known that its absorption by the oceans decreased rapidly between 1997 and 2006 in the subpolar region of the North Atlantic. Now, a French-Spanish team has identified one of the reasons for this decrease: the slowing down of the oceanic “conveyor belt”, which transports warm surface water to high latitudes and cold deep water southward. Nature Geoscience January 2013 2 4 PLANETARY SCIENCE After landing on Mars in 2012, NASA's Curiosity rover headed toward Yellowknife Bay, a depression where fluviallacustrine deposits may once have been laid down. The mission's researchers carried out a detailed study of the samples collected in the area. Analyses revealed an ancient Martian environment very different from today's, leading the scientists to conclude that Mars was once habitable, like Earth. Science December 2013 © Ifremer / Ovide BEST OF SCIENCE © NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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