Covering your surfboard in bright lights sounds like an open invitation to great white sharks, but research released Tuesday by Australian scientists found it might actually stave off attacks.

Biologist Laura Ryan said the predator often attacked its prey from underneath, occasionally mistaking a surfer’s silhouette for the outline of a seal.

Ryan and her fellow researchers showed that seal-shaped boards decked with bright horizontal lights were less likely to be attacked by great white sharks.

This appeared to be because the lights distorted the silhouette on the ocean’s surface, making it appear less appetizing.

“There is this longstanding fear of white sharks and part of that fear is that we don’t understand them that well,” said Ryan, from Australia’s Macquarie University.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, was conducted in the waters of South Africa’s Mossel Bay, a popular great white feeding ground.

Seal-shaped decoys were strung with different configurations of LED lights and towed behind a boat to see which attracted the most attention.

Brighter lights were better at deterring sharks, the research found, while vertical lights were less effective than horizontal.

Macquarie University Professor Nathan Hart, one of the study’s authors, said the lights caused a “complex interaction” with the shark’s behavior.

“It’s like an invisibility cloak but with the exception that we are splitting the object, the visual silhouette, into smaller bits,” Hart said.

The study’s authors released a video showing some of the research in action.

Ryan said the results were better than expected and is now in the process of building prototypes for use on the underside of kayaks and surfboards.

Australia has some of the world’s most comprehensive shark management measures, including monitoring drones, shark nets and a tagging system that alerts authorities when a shark is near a crowded beach.

Ryan said her research could allow less invasive mitigation methods to be used.

More research was needed to see if bull and tiger sharks — which have different predatory behavior — responded to the lights in a similar way, the authors said.

There have been more than 1,200 shark incidents in Australia since 1791, of which 255 resulted in death, official data shows.

Great white sharks were responsible for 94 of those deaths.

The overall number of deadly shark attacks worldwide in 2023 remained relatively low, but it was still twice the previous year’s total, according to the latest iteration of the International Shark Attack File — a database of global shark attacks run by the University of Florida. 

The report noted that a “disproportionate” amount of people died from shark bites in Australia last year compared with other countries around the world.

A jet of liquid can bounce off of a hot plate without ever touching it. This extension of the Leidenfrost effect – the phenomenon that allows beads of water to skitter across a scorching pan – could help improve cooling processes, from nuclear reactors to firefighting.

Though first described nearly 300 years ago, the Leidenfrost effect has only been tested with fluid droplets, not squirts of liquid. Until now.

Frack Celestini at Côte d’Azur…

Washington — Oil and natural gas companies for the first time will have to pay a federal fee if they emit dangerous methane above certain levels under a rule being made final by the Biden administration.

The Environmental Protection Agency rule follows through on a directive from Congress included in the 2022 climate law. The new fee is intended to encourage industry to adopt best practices that reduce emissions of methane – the primary component of natural gas – and thereby avoid paying.

Methane is a climate “super pollutant” that is far more potent in the short term than carbon dioxide and is responsible for about one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. The oil and natural gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States, and advocates say reduction of methane emissions is a crucial way to slow climate change.

The rule, set to be announced Tuesday at an international climate conference in Azerbaijan, comes hours after President-elect Donald Trump named former New York congressman Lee Zeldin to head the agency in Trump’s second term. If confirmed by the Senate, Zeldin is expected to move to reverse or loosen dozens of environmental regulations approved under President Biden as Trump seeks to establish U.S. “energy dominance″ worldwide.

Trump is likely to target the methane fee amid a flurry of expected actions he has promised to deregulate the oil and gas industry.

As outlined by the EPA, excess methane produced in 2024 could result in a fee of $900 per ton, with fees rising to $1,200 per ton in 2025 and $1,500 per ton by 2026. Industry groups are likely to challenge the rule, including any effort to impose a retroactive fee.

The rule wouldn’t become final until early next year, following publication in the Federal Register.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement that the rule will work in tandem with a new EPA rule on methane emissions imposed this year. The rule targets the U.S. oil and natural gas industry for its role in global warming as Mr. Biden seeks to secure his legacy on fighting climate change.

The fee, formally known as the Waste Emissions Charge, will encourage early deployment of available technologies to reduce methane emissions and other harmful air pollutants, Regan said. The fee “is the latest in a series of actions under President Biden’s methane strategy to improve efficiency in the oil and gas sector, support American jobs, protect clean air and reinforce U.S. leadership on the global stage,” he said.

Industry groups and Republican-led states have challenged the earlier methane rule in court, but lost a bid for the Supreme Court to block the rule while the case continues before lower-level judges.

Opponents argue that the EPA overstepped its authority and set unattainable standards with the new regulations. The EPA, though, said the rules are squarely within its legal responsibilities and would protect the public.

Many large oil and gas companies already meet or exceed methane-performance levels set by Congress under the climate law, meaning they are unlikely to be forced to pay the new fee, Regan and other officials said.

Even so, the EPA estimates that the rule will result in cumulative emissions reductions of 1.2 million metric tons of methane (the equivalent of 34 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide) through 2035. That figure is similar to clean-air gains from taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year, the EPA said. Cumulative climate benefits could total as much $2 billion, the agency said.

Like the earlier methane rule, the new fee faces a near-certain legal challenge from industry groups. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s largest lobbying group, called a fee proposed earlier this year a “punitive tax increase” that “undermines America’s energy advantage.”

The API said it looks forward to working with Congress to repeal the “misguided new tax on American energy.”

Environmental groups, for their part, have hailed the impending methane fee, saying oil and gas companies should be held accountable for pollution that contributes to global warming. Oil and gas companies routinely calculate that it’s cheaper to waste methane through flaring and other techniques than to make necessary upgrades to prevent leaks, they said.

The EPA said it expects that over time, fewer oil and gas companies will be charged for excess methane as they reduce emissions in compliance with the rule.

Beirut — Declassified 1970s-era U.S. spy satellite imagery has led a British-Iraqi archeological team to what they believe is the site of a seventh-century battle that became decisive in the spread of Islam throughout the region.

The Battle of al-Qadisiyah was fought in Mesopotamia — in present-day Iraq — in the A.D. 630s between Arab Muslims and the army of the Sassanid Persian dynasty during a period of Muslim expansion. The Arab army prevailed and continued on its march into Persia, now Iran.

A joint team of archeologists from the U.K.’s Durham University and the University of Al-Qadisiyah stumbled across the site while undertaking a remote sensing survey to map the Darb Zubaydah, a pilgrimage route from Iraq’s Kufa to Mecca in Saudi Arabia built more than 1,000 years ago. The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity.

While mapping the route, the team noticed that a site some 20 miles south of Kufa in Iraq’s southern Najaf province — a desert area with scattered plots of agricultural land — had features that closely matched the description of the al-Qadisiyah battle site described in historic texts.

William Deadman, a specialist in archaeological remote sensing at Durham University, said the Cold War era satellite images are commonly used tools by archeologists working in the Middle East because the older images often show features that have been destroyed or altered and wouldn’t show up on present-day satellite images.

“The Middle East has developed so much in the last 50 years, both agricultural expansion and urban expansion,” he said. Some of the distinguishing features at the al-Qadisiyah site, such as a distinctive trench, were “much more pristine and clear” in the 1970s images, he said.

A survey on the ground confirmed the findings and convinced the team that they had correctly identified the site.

The key features were a deep trench, two fortresses and an ancient river that was reportedly once forded by elephant-mounted Persian troops, said Jaafar Jotheri, a professor of archeology at the University of Al-Qadisiyah who’s part of the team that made the discovery. The survey team also found pottery shards consistent with the time period when the battle took place.

A revealing, well-known battle

Jotheri said Iraqis of his generation, who grew up under the rule of Saddam Hussein, were all familiar with the battle in minute detail, down to the names of the generals on both sides.

The battle at the time had political connotations — Iraq was engaged in a devastating war with Iran through much of the 1980s. Saddam pointed to the Battle of Qadisiyah as a harbinger of victory for Iraq.

Like most children growing up in that era, Jotheri said he’d watched a popular movie about the battle multiple times as it was on regular rotation on television.

In the post-Saddam era, al-Qadisiyah has become something of a political litmus test. Iraqis’ views of the battle vary depending on their feelings toward Iran, which has expanded its influence in the country since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam.

“There is some political and religious context in this battle because now, of course, we have religious differences, ethnic differences, political differences in Iraq and we read or we view everything based on our … differences,” Jotheri said. But he added, “We all agree that it is a very important battle, a decisive one, and we all know about it.”

Discovery was part of a regional trend

The team plans to begin excavations at the site in the coming year, Jotheri said.

The discovery comes as part of a broader project launched in 2015 to document endangered archaeological sites in the region.

It also comes at the time of a resurgence of archeology in Iraq, a country often referred to as the “cradle of civilization,” but where archeological exploration has been stunted by decades of conflict that halted excavations and led to the looting of tens of thousands of artifacts.

In recent years, the digs have returned and thousands of stolen artifacts have been repatriated.