There's some good news as hurricane season is getting under way: an MIT graduate student has developed a computer model that helps evacuation managers make better decisions, and possibly save lives in the process.

Weeks before Hurricane Gustav slammed into the Caribbean and the Louisiana Gulf Coast, hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University continued to warn of the higher-than-average probability of at least one intense (or major) hurricane making landfall in the United States in the remaining months of this year's hurricane season.

In London, Ontario, a team from the University of Western Ontario is bringing a fairy tale to life at the Insurance Research Lab for Better Homes. They don't have a wolf, but in their "Three Little Pigs" project they are literally trying to blow the roof off, subjecting full-scale houses to pressures that simulate wind forces matching those of a Category 5 hurricane: 200 mph. Researchers are looking to find the sources of structural weakness in house construction in order to improve building design in the future.

So it looks like it's not all gloom and doom after all. A few recent studies have managed to find the slim silver lining of climate change. Below, a look at the three small positive outcomes of global warming.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday that 2008 could be a busy hurricane season. Between twelve and 16 storms may be big enough to earn names, and six to nine should be intense enough to be qualified as hurricanes. And of those, two to five could be major.

Tropical Cyclone Nargis slammed the Burmese coast with 130 mph winds and bursts of up to 160 mph—the equivalent of a category 3 or low-level category 4 hurricane. It reportedly led to thousands of deaths, and as of Monday, thousands more were missing. Now NASA has released a set of images that show how drastically the flooding has drenched Burma's coast.

MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel got a ton of attention in 2005 when he published a paper in Nature demonstrating a link between global warming and hurricanes—especially since Katrina hit New Orleans just three weeks later.

MIT researchers have proposed a strange new way to predict the severity of a hurricane: Listening underwater. Currently, the most common way to gauge a storm's strength is to either study satellite images (which can be pretty inaccurate), or fly a weather plane straight on into the storm and gather critical data (which gets expensive).

Humans are fleeting visitors on this roiling rock in the universe. On December 26, 2004, at 58 minutes and 49 seconds past midnight GMT, Mother Earth reacquainted us with this immutable fact. For millions of years, a creeping slab of Earth´s crust—the India Plate—had been grinding headlong into a similarly stubborn chunk of rock called the Burma Plate. Like a clash of Brobdingnagian armies, millennia of pent-up kinetic energy suddenly exploded from the seabed, a scant 100 miles from Sumatra, Indonesia.

It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. "New Orleans," says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. "Because the city is below sea level-with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other-it is a hydrologic nightmare." The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricane´s leading edge.