New study details how major real-world events grow and strengthen global hate networks online, inciting new hate content around specific hot-button issues.

A web-based application that gathers crowdsourced data to identify flooding and inform policy in coastal communities provided University of South Florida scientists with essential data from hurricanes Helene and Milton. Developed through a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant, the app can help inform decisions about policy and resource allocation.

During a fire, chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are released into the environment, exposing everyone from firefighters to backyard grillers. A handful of PAHs have been officially identified as potentially cancer-causing, and only one is considered a carcinogen.

Professional field experience from UCLA adjunct professor of chemistry — and full-time Los Angeles County Fire Department firefighter — Derek Urwin helped to focus investigations into how PAHs interact with a DNA sequence that is mutated in one third of all human cancers.

Urwin and his UCLA colleagues used molecular simulations to show that six PAHs are more likely than the known carcinogen to latch onto a mutational hot spot in the genome linked to cancer, and to evade a crucial mechanism for repairing DNA lesions.