Attention at all passengers. You can now book your train tickets on Uber and get 10% back in Uber credits to spend on your next train journey.

So no excuses not to visit your in-laws this Christmas.

Trains now on Uber. T's and here's a short piece from the December 2020 issue of the magazine in the section called Advances

Dispatches from the frontiers of science technology and medicine.

The article is titled Quick Hits and it's a rundown of some non-Korona virus stories from around the globe.

In the US, Western Joshua trees will get a year of temporary endangered species status in California,

while the state considers permanently listing the distinctive succulents as the first ever plant species protected because of climate change related threat.

In Panama, a tropical forest ground survey revealed that one lightning strike often damages

more than 20 trees, a quarter of which can die within a year.

Researchers combined the finding with satellite data to estimate that lightning kills

200 million tropical trees worldwide every year, a significant cause of their demise.

In Greenland, climate researchers discovered records of an automatic weather station that measured

negative 93.3 degrees Fahrenheit one day in December 1991, a temperature

colder than the average on Mars, and the coldest ever recorded in the northern hemisphere.

In Italy, scientists have examined a shark found south of Sardinia that somehow survived to three years old without skin or teeth.

They concluded it was a genetic mutation and planned to check nearby sediment for potential pollutant causes.

In China, newly discovered and pristinely preserved fossils suggest two sleeping dinosaurs

were buried alive in an underground burrow 125 million years ago. The burrow may have collapsed under

volcanic debris. In Australia a new study shows how grasslands strange barren

patches called fairy circles are landscaped by the grasses themselves.

Baking heat creates a hard clay crust over a patch of ground.

Water runs off of it, forming a more welcoming zone at its edges that grasses bolster as they grow and cool the soil.

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