Heavens

The once mighty super typhoon has weakened to a depression in the South China Sea as it heads for a final landfall in southern Vietnam. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the storm that showed it was weakening.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Hagupit on Dec. 11 at 05:20 UTC (12:20 a.m. EST) and the MODIS instrument captured a visible image of the storm. The MODIS image showed that the thunderstorms had become fragmented around the circulation center.

San Antonio -- December 11, 2014 -- Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is preparing to unveil a new, miniature portable solar observatory for use onboard a commercial, manned suborbital spacecraft. The SwRI Solar Instrument Pointing Platform (SSIPP) will be on exhibit at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Dec. 16-19, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.

DARIEN, IL - A new study shows that paid work time is the primary waking activity exchanged for sleep and suggests that chronic sleep loss potentially could be prevented by strategies that make work start times more flexible.

Could there finally be tangible evidence for the existence of dark matter in the Universe? After sifting through reams of X-ray data, scientists in EPFL's Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC) and Leiden University believe they could have identified the signal of a particle of dark matter. This substance, which up to now has been purely hypothetical, is run by none of the standard models of physics other than through the gravitational force. Their research will be published next week in Physical Review Letters.

A 13-year decline in vegetation in the eastern and southeastern Amazon has been linked to a decade-long rainfall decline in the region, a new NASA-funded study finds.

With global climate models projecting further drying over the Amazon in the future, the potential loss of vegetation and the associated loss of carbon storage may speed up global climate change.

Typhoon Hagupit soaked the Philippines, and a NASA rainfall analysis indicated the storm dropped almost 19 inches in some areas. After Hagupit departed the Philippines as a tropical storm, NASA's Terra satellite passed over and captured a picture of the storm curled up like a cat waiting to pounce when it landfalls in Vietnam on Dec. 11.

New school and office workspace designs created by a group of Penn State engineering students are intended to allow users to share space and materials while maintaining their own work areas -- a dual purpose the researchers say has been neglected.

Fathering offspring is more than just a race to the egg

• Longer sperm are better at fertilising eggs, study reveals
• But females also influence a male's fertilising success
• Research may produce clues to understanding human fertility

The chance of a male fathering offspring may not be a simple race to the egg, but is influenced by the length of the male's sperm, say scientists from the University of Sheffield.

Is being located next to a big-name competitor always bad for your small business? A new study in the Journal of Marketing Research shows that contrary to accepted belief, the presence of a large, nearby competitor can actually boost the sales of smaller brands.

Is being located next to a big-name competitor always bad for your small business? A new study in the Journal of Marketing Research shows that contrary to accepted belief, the presence of a large, nearby competitor can actually boost the sales of smaller brands.

As of Dec. 8, Super Typhoon Hagupit has caused up to 27 deaths. Early reports indicate the Philippines has been spared the widespread destruction caused by Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. Hagupit (called Ruby in the Philippines) forward motion slowed on December 4, 2014 before reaching the Philippines. After hitting Samar in the eastern Philippines Hagupit's continued slow movement resulted in high rainfall amounts along the typhoon's track. These high rainfall totals meant that flooding occurred frequently along the typhoon's track.

A leopard may not be able to change its spots, but new research from a World Heritage site in Nepal indicates that leopards do change their activity patterns in response to tigers and humans--but in different ways.

As sand dunes march across the Sahara, vast dunes cross the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. New research from a refurbished NASA wind tunnel reveals the physics of how particles move in Titan's methane-laden winds and could help to explain why Titan's dunes form in the way they do. The work is published online Dec. 8 in the journal Nature.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is one of the few solar system bodies - and the only planetary moon - known to have fields of wind-blown dunes on its surface. (The others are Venus, Earth and Mars.)

New research, using experimental results from the high-pressure wind tunnel at Arizona State University's Planetary Aeolian Laboratory, has found that previous estimates of how fast winds need to blow to move sand-size particles around on Titan are about 40 percent too low.

An enormous spectrum of light streams from the sun. We're most familiar with the conventional visible white light we see with our eyes from Earth, but that's just a fraction of what our closest star emits. NASA regularly watches the sun in numerous wavelengths because different wavelengths provide information about different temperatures and processes in space. Looking at all the wavelengths together helps to provide a complete picture of what's occurring on the sun over 92 million miles away - but no one has been able to focus on high energy X-rays from the sun until recently.