Heavens

MINNEAPOLIS - An estrogen-like drug, raloxifene, has no demonstrated benefit on memory and thinking skills for women with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, according to a study published in the November 4, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (http://www.ucr.edu) -- Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have found parts produced by some commercial 3D printers are toxic to certain fish embryos. Their results have raised questions about how to dispose of parts and waste materials from 3D printers.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered an adolescent protostar that is undergoing a rapid-fire succession of growth spurts. Evidence for this fitful youth is seen in a pair of intermittent jets streaming away from the star's poles.

New Haven, Conn. - A Yale-led study has found a cluster of young stars that develop in distinct, episodic spurts.

It is the first time astronomers have seen such a growth pattern within a star cluster -- a chaotic, turbulent environment that is common for star formation. Previous observations have focused on stars forming in more isolated regions of space.

WASHINGTON, DC -- Annual snow accumulation on West Antarctica's coastal ice sheet increased dramatically during the 20th century, according to a new study published in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The research gives scientists new insight into Antarctica's blanket of ice. Understanding how the ice sheet grows and shrinks over time enhances scientists' understanding of the processes that impact global sea levels, according to the study's authors.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite added up the totals as Cyclone Chapala dropped a lot of rain moving across the Arabian Sea to landfall in Yemen.

While study has long been conducted on vertebrates with sight-sensory systems involving a lens, retina and nervous system, new research reported by the University of Cincinnati and supported by the National Science Foundation is the first to examine how the complex eye system of an invertebrate - the Sunburst Diving Beetle - coordinates the development of its components. Despite the complexity of their eyes, including a bifocal lens, extremely rapid eye growth of the Sunburst Diving Beetle occurs during the transitions between larval stages.

Movies such as 1987's "Predator," in which an alien who sees in the infrared hunts down Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team, introduced a generation of sci-fi fans to thermal imaging. Since then, heat-sensing devices have found many real-word applications but have remained relatively expensive and rigid. But a new development featuring graphene, reported in ACS' journal Nano Letters, could lead to a flexible, transparent and low-cost infrared vision system.

About $5 billion worth of unused prescription drugs get flushed down toilets, tossed in the trash or left in medicine cabinets across the U.S. each year. These practices can contribute to a host of problems, including water pollution and drug abuse. To address these issues, some local governments are starting to intervene, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.

Installed on APEX earlier this year, SEPIA [1] is sensitive to light with wavelengths in the range 1.4-1.8 millimetres [2]. The exceptional observing conditions on the extremely dry Chajnantor Plateau in northern Chile mean that, although this light is blocked by water vapour in the atmosphere at most places on Earth, SEPIA is still able to detect the faint signals coming from space.

Augmented reality is the enhancement of human perception through overlaying technologies that can expand, annotate and even record the user's moment-to-moment experience.

Those designing coming augmented reality systems should make them adaptable to change, resistant to hacking and responsive to the needs of diverse users, according to a white paper by an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the University of Washington's Tech Policy Lab.

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 3 - When a male Asian Citrus Psyllid is looking for a mate, he situates himself on a twig, buzzes his wings to send vibrations along adjacent leaves and branches, and listens for a female's response call. If the call comes, he travels in her direction, the abbreviated insect version of courtship ensues, and two to seven weeks later, scores of psyllids nymphs emerge from their eggs, feed on phloem sap, and mature into adults who head out into the world, ravaging untold numbers of citrus trees in the process.

Augmented reality is the enhancement of human perception through overlaying technologies that can expand, annotate and even record the user's moment-to-moment experience.

Those designing coming augmented reality systems should make them adaptable to change, resistant to hacking and responsive to the needs of diverse users, according to a white paper by an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the University of Washington's Tech Policy Lab.

Tropical Cyclone Chapala made landfall in Yemen early on November 3 (Eastern Standard Time) and made history as the first land-falling tropical storm in 30 years of record-keeping. As Chapala made landfall NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead twice.

Stem cells have two important capabilities: they can develop into a wide range of cell types and simultaneously renew themselves, creating fresh stem cells. Using a model of the blood forming (hematopoietic) system, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now been able to precisely determine, which signaling pathways play an essential role in the self-renewal of blood stem cells. A particularly decisive role in this process is the interactive communication with surrounding tissue cells in the bone marrow.