Severe heat waves have occasionally led to catastrophic avian mortality in hot desert environments. Climate change models predict increases in the intensity, frequency and duration of heat waves. A model of avian evaporative water requirements and survival times during the hottest part of day reveals that the predicted increases in maximum air temperatures will result in large fractional increa...

How should we evaluate public policies or projects that are intended to reduce the likelihood or potential impact of a catastrophic event? Examples might include a greenhouse gas abatement policy to avert a climate change catastrophe, or the construction of levees to avert major flooding. Projects that reduce the likelihood or potential impact of catastrophic events are essentially out-of-the-m...

We describe a significant practical consequence of taking anthropic biases into account in deriving predictions for rare stochastic catastrophic events. The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovae/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy...

Unlike the brain, artificial neural networks, including state-of-the-art deep networks for computer vision, are subject to "catastrophic forgetting": they rapidly forget previous task when trained on a new one. Neuroscience suggests that biological synapses avoid this issue through process of synaptic consolidation and metaplasticity: plasticity itself changes upon repeated events. In work, we ...

Extreme events, a type of collective behavior in complex networked dynamical systems, often can have catastrophic consequences. To develop effective strategies to control extreme events is of fundamental importance and practical interest. Utilizing transportation dynamics on complex networks as a prototypical setting, we find that making the network "mobile" can effectively suppress extreme eve...

Bulk metallic glass alloys were processed into foam by several synthesis routes. These methods utilize the thermodynamic stability and thermoplastic formability of the supercooled liquid state to produce low-density homogeneous foams. The cellular structure is shown to evolve by growth of randomly distributed spherical bubbles towards polyhedral-like cells separated by microscopic intracellular...

BACKGROUND In Vietnam, illnesses create high out-of-pocket health care expenditures for households. In this study, the burden of illness in the Bavi district, Vietnam is measured based upon individual household health expenditures for communicable and non-communicable illnesses. The focus of the paper is on the relative effect of different illnesses on the total economic burden of health care o...

Genomic instability is a well-known hallmark of cancer. Recent genome sequencing studies have led to the identification of novel phenomena called chromothripsis and chromoanasynthesis in which complex genomic rearrangements are thought to be derived from a single catastrophic event rather than by several incremental steps. A new term chromoanagenesis or chromosomal rebirth was coined recently t...