At the beginning of June, the German Weather Service counted 177,000 lightning bolts in the night sky within a few days. The natural spectacle had consequences: Several people were injured by gusts of wind, hail and rain. Together with Germany's National Meteorological Service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst, computer science professor Jens Dittrich and his doctoral student Christian Schön from Saarland University are now working on a system that is supposed to predict local thunderstorms more precisely than before. It is based on satellite images and artificial intelligence. In order to investigate this approach in more detail, the researchers will receive 270,000 euros from the Federal Ministry of Transport.

One of the core tasks of weather services is to warn of dangerous weather conditions. These include thunderstorms in particular, as these are often accompanied by gusts of wind, hail and heavy rainfall. The Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) uses the "NowcastMIX" system for this purpose. Every five minutes it polls several remote sensing systems and observation networks to warn of thunderstorms, heavy rain and snowfall in the next two hours. "However, NowcastMIX can only detect the thunderstorm cells when heavy precipitation has already occurred. This is why satellite data are used to detect the formation of thunderstorm cells earlier and thus to warn of them earlier," explains Professor Jens Dittrich, who teaches computer science at Saarland University and heads the "Big Data Analytics" group.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology brain sciences department and, separately, a group of some 200 neuroscientists from around the world have written letters to The New York Times claiming that a book excerpt in the newspaper's Sunday magazine this week contains important errors, misinterpretations of scientific disputes, and unfair characterizations of an MIT neuroscientist who did groundbreaking research on human memory. In particular, the excerpt contains a 36-volley verbatim exchange between author Luke Dittrich and MIT's Suzanne Corkin in which she says that key documents from historic experiments were "shredded." "Most of it has gone, is in the trash, was shredded," Corkin is quoted as telling Dittrich before she died in May, explaining, "there's no place to preserve it." Destroying files related to historic scientific research would raise eyebrows, but Corkin's colleagues say it never happened. "We believe that no records were destroyed and, to the contrary, that professor Corkin worked in her final days to organize and preserve all records," said the letter that Dr. James DiCarlo, head of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, sent to the Times late Tuesday.

If your resolution for the coming year is to spend less time on your commute scrolling through Twitter or playing "Puzzler on the Roof," there's no shortage of fantastic and fantastical new books you can use to take a break from mindless screen time. Curating this year's new arrivals was tough, but we managed to narrow the list down to our top-ten favorites. Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich There's a certain poetic intrigue to the story of Henry Molaison, the most important neuroscience subject of the 20th-century, as told through the eyes of science writer Luke Dittrich. In the 1950s, it was Dittrich's grandfather, William Scoville, who tried to cure Molaison of his epileptic seizures by removing signifiant portions of his brain. Instead, the lobotomy turned Molaison into a profound amnesiac, living the rest of his life in a series of 30-second increments.