Noted

A dream house on the North American seashore may be a nightmare in the future. Researchers from Yale and MIT have modeled the worldwide impact of hurricanes and tropical storms through 2100. They estimate that global warming—along with increases in coastal populations and the global economy—will quadruple damage from storms from $26 billion today to $109 billion within the century. (The results appeared in Nature Climate Change.)

Feeling pale this spring? Don't be tempted by a tanning parlor, Yale researchers warn. Their study, in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, found a 69 percent increase in early-onset basal-cell carcinoma among a group of men and women under 40 who used tanning beds. The incidence of BCC was largest among women and increased with tanning bed use.

A Galápagos tortoise species believed extinct for 150 years may survive at a remote location in the islands. Chelonoidis elephantopus, which shaped Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution, disappeared because of overhunting. But a genetic analysis of a close Chelonoidis relative by evolutionary biologist Gisella Caccone '86PhD and her colleagues uncovered evidence of recent hybridization between it and the Chelonoidis. The Current Biology study suggests that more than three dozen of the hybrid reptiles remain alive.

The "hot hand phenomenon"—the theory that success in some aspect of a sport increases the chances for subsequent successes—is not an illusion, according to Yale's Gur Yaari, a computational biologist, and Gil David, a mathematician. After studying almost 42,000 games rolled by the top 100 professional bowlers, their conclusion, presented in PLoS One, is that rolling strikes in the early part of a game correlates with strikes at the end.