Uniontown, Ala., a low-income, predominantly black community located in the state’s Black Belt, made the national news back in 2010, when 4 million tons of coal ash were shipped to its Arrowhead Landfill in the wake of a dike rupture at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant. As telltale signs of contamination began to pile up, word made its way to Dr. Azita Amiri, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) who serves as the chairwoman of the Alabama State Nurses Association’s Environmental Taskforce.

What kinds of weather do people find remarkable, when does that change, and what does that say about the public’s perception of climate change? A study led by the University of California, Davis, examined those questions through the lens of more than 2 billion U.S. Twitter posts. The study indicates that people have short memories when it comes to what they consider “normal” weather.

Yanfang Ye, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at West Virginia University, has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of Justice in support of her work to develop novel artificial intelligence techniques to combat the opioid epidemic and trafficking. “As of today, we still lack deep insight into the online ecosystem of opioid trafficking,” said Ye. “In addition to offline data, utilizing AI technologies to obtain knowledge and recognize patterns from online data across the darknet and surface net could provide leads.