Heavens

NASA's Swift spacecraft has detected its 1,000th gamma-ray burst (GRB). GRBs are the most powerful explosions in the universe, typically associated with the collapse of a massive star and the birth of a black hole.

"Detecting GRBs is Swift's bread and butter, and we're now at 1,000 and counting," said Neil Gehrels, the Swift principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The spacecraft remains in great shape after nearly 11 years in space, and we expect to see many more GRBs to come."

Yemen's Socotra Island just endured Cyclone Chapala and just a week later is facing a second tropical cyclone: Megh. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Megh and captured data on the strengthening storm on Nov., 6.

When Aqua flew over Megh from space, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard took a visible picture of the storm. The MODIS image showed fragmented bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the low-level center, which was obscured by clouds.

A team of astronomers working at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA, TIFR), Pune have discovered, using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), an extremely rare galaxy of gigantic size. This galaxy -- located about 9 billion light years away towards the constellation Cetus -- emits powerful radio waves and has an end to end extent of a whopping 4 million light years! Such galaxies with extremely large 'radio size' are appropriately called giant radio galaxies.

KINGSTON, ON- An interactive swarm of flying 3D pixels (voxels) developed at Queen's University's Human Media Lab is set to revolutionize the way people interact with virtual reality. The system, called BitDrones, allows users to explore virtual 3D information by interacting with physical self-levitating building blocks.

Archaeologists with The Australian National University (ANU) have discovered fossils of seven giant rat species on East Timor, with the largest up to 10 times the size of modern rats.

Dr Julien Louys of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language, who is helping lead the project said these are the largest known rats to have ever existed.

"They are what you would call mega-fauna. The biggest one is about five kilos, the size of a small dog," Dr Louys said.

Despite being discovered 20 years ago, very little is known about brown dwarfs - notably why they fail to grow into stars.

Scientists say part of the answer probably lies in the physics of how dense plasmas merge inside them.

Now researchers, led by the York Plasma Institute at the University of York and the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Central Laser Facility, have created "lumps" of plasma to recreate the conditions similar to those found deep inside brown dwarfs.

A Newcastle University study has shown that baby birds that have a difficult start in life grow to be fatter and greedier than their more fortunate siblings.

The researchers, led by Professor Melissa Bateson and Dr Clare Andrews, discovered that stress and difficulties as a chick made a long lasting impression on a starling's relationship with food.

Less than 20 years ago the world learned that the universe is expanding ever faster, propelled by dark energy. The discovery was made possible by Type Ia supernovae; extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar in brightness, they serve as "standard candles" essential for probing the universe's history.

Mars has been all over the news, from the blockbuster finding of seasonal water on the Red Planet to the wildly successful film, The Martian. Now, researchers--including those at the University of Iowa--have learned more about what happened to the climate on Mars since it was a warm and watery planet billions of years ago.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to conduct a "cosmic archaeological dig" at the very heart of our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have uncovered the blueprints of our galaxy's early construction phase.

Peering deep into the Milky Way's crowded central hub of stars, Hubble researchers have uncovered for the first time a population of ancient white dwarfs -- smoldering remnants of once-vibrant stars that inhabited the core. Finding these relics at last can yield clues to how our galaxy was built, long before Earth and our sun formed.

This issue of Science features four studies highlighting results from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, designed to study Mars' upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere. The novel data reveals some surprises, as well as some adjustments to previous theories and estimates. This issue's cover represents a real data visualization of Mars' magnetic field being bombarded by a powerful solar ejection, resulting in a stunning visual of fire-like tendrils emulating from the Red Planet.

When Sarah Thébaud analyzed survey data from 24 countries -- including the United States -- between 2001 and 2008, she found some interesting evidence regarding gender gaps and entrepreneurship and the relationship between those gender gaps and government policies.

It turns out, the assistant professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara discovered, the circumstances that spur women to start their own businesses in the first place have a tremendous influence on the kinds of enterprises they establish.

NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite caught another tropical cyclone forming on Nov. 4, 2015 at 1255 UTC (7:55 a.m. EST) in the Arabian Sea.

In 1920's Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer, showed that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from the earth, known as Hubble's law. Hubble's law is taken as the first observational basis for the expansion of the Universe, and provides strong evidence for the Big Bang model. The value of the expansion rate is called the Hubble constant. Hubble constant is a critical parameter in cosmology and the measurement of Hubble constant is a key task for the astrophysicists and cosmologists. Recently a Chinese team leaded by Prof.

SAN ANTONIO, TX (November 5, 2015) - Imagine you suffer from severe asthma, and you've tried every treatment available, but nothing has worked. You still can't breathe. Then a new therapy comes along that attacks the source of the asthma, as opposed to the symptoms, and treats the disease at a cellular level. That's the promise of biologics, and the topic of four presentations at the 2015 ACAAI Annual Scientific Meeting in San Antonio, November 5-9.