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slash UK slash AI for people. I'm Scientific American Assistant News Editor Sarah Lewin-Frasier,

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-coronavirus stories from

around the globe.

In the U.S., Western Joshua trees will get a year of temporary endangered species

status in California, while the state considers permanently listing the distinctive succulence

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 combine 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.

...