Best of Last Week: Global warming hot spots already here, fastest robot yet, and vitamin D deficiency worsens COVID-19

It was a good week for Earth sciences as a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that in some cases, cold air rises—and showed what that could mean for Earth's climate. They found that in the tropics, sometimes cold air rises due to the lightness of water vapor. Also, a team led by Columbia University's Colin Raymond found that potentially fatal combinations of humidity and heat are emerging across the globe—far earlier than has been predicted. And a team at Rice University developed an 'artificial leaf' concept that inspired research into solar-powered fuel production— which led them to create a low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel.

In technology news, a team at North Carolina State University, inspired by cheetahs, built the fastest soft robots yet—quadrupeds that feature a spring-powered, 'bistable' spine and are part of a new class of robots called "Leveraging Elastic instabilities for Amplified Performance" (LEAP). Also, a combined team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz developed a simple method for measuring the state of lithium-ion batteries using atomic magnetometry. And a team at the University of Southampton mapped wind and solar energy sites around the globe for the first time. Also, a team from Pennsylvania State University, Minjiang University and Guizhou Education University suggested that emerging supercapacitors promise storage, high power and fast charging.

In other news, Anirban Basu, with the University of Washington in Seattle, calculated that the U.S. COVID-19 death rate is 1.3%—excluding undetected cases. And in somewhat related news, a team at Michigan State University conducted a study into mysterious giant viruses—and in so doing, identified and characterized several key proteins responsible for orchestrating infections.

And finally, if you are like millions of others wondering if there is a way to increase your chances of surviving novel coronavirus infection, you might want to check out the results of a study conducted by a team at Northwestern University—they found that vitamin D deficiency appears to play a role in COVID-19 mortality rates.

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