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The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years, even though the total number of hurricanes has dropped since the 1990s. The shift occurred as global sea surface temperatures have increased over the same period.

This research has just been published in the prestigious journal Science. Atmospheric scientist Peter Webster says, “What we found was rather astonishing. In the 1970s, there was an average of about 10 Category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year globally. Since 1990, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, averaging 18 per year globally.”
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The author Kurt Vonnegut recently said, “We are not nice animals, and the Earth’s immune system is trying to shake us off.” How many future generations of humans will the beleaguered Earth be able to sustain?
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There may be criminals behind bars who shouldn’t have been convicted. In recent years, we’ve seen DNA testing release many of these convicts, often after decades of incarceration. But fingerprints can’t be wrong?or can they?

Duncan Graham-Rowe writes in New Scientist that the reliability of fingerprinting is currently being tested in court. While fingerprinting is technically reliable, it suffers from human error: nobody knows how often fingerprint examiners make a mistake. Despite more than a century of use, fingerprinting has never been scientifically validated.
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We recently reported that the Phoenix lights seem to have turned up in the UK. The reports of strange orange lights in the night skies of parts of England still have experts stumped.

If you?re intrigued by mysteries in the sky, listen to Dreamland this week, when science reporter Linda Howe reports on Planet X and the strange objects recently found in the Kuiper Belt.
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