Heavens

PULLMAN, Wash. - More than one-third of new commercial building space includes energy-saving features, but without training or an operator's manual many occupants are in the dark about how to use them.

Julia Day recently published a paper in Building and Environment showing for the first time that occupants who had effective training in using the features of their high-performance buildings were more satisfied with their work environments. Day did the work as a doctoral student at Washington State University; she is now an assistant professor at Kansas State University.

With the help of citizen scientists, a team of astronomers has found an important new example of a very rare type of galaxy that may yield valuable insight on how galaxies developed in the early Universe. The new discovery technique promises to give astronomers many more examples of this important and mysterious type of galaxy.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Today's atmosphere likely bears little trace of its primordial self: Geochemical evidence suggests that Earth's atmosphere may have been completely obliterated at least twice since its formation more than 4 billion years ago. However, it's unclear what interplanetary forces could have driven such a dramatic loss.

Turn on any local TV weather forecast and you can get a map of where skies are blue or cloudy. But for scientists trying to figure out how clouds affect the Earth's environment, what's happening inside that shifting cloud cover is critical and hard to see.

NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel, or HS3, mission investigated four tropical cyclones in the 2014 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season: Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard and Gonzalo. The storms affected land areas in the Atlantic Ocean Basin and were at different stages during the investigations.

MADISON, Wis. -- In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess wizard Garry Kasparov. This year, a computer system developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison equaled or bested scientists at the complex task of extracting data from scientific publications and placing it in a database that catalogs the results of tens of thousands of individual studies.

MADISON, Wis. - In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess wizard Gary Kasparov. This year, a computer system developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison achieved something far more complex. It equaled or bested scientists at the complex task of extracting data from scientific publications and placing it in a database that catalogs the results of tens of thousands of individual studies.

Tropical Storm Sinlaku made landfall in east-central Vietnam bringing some moderate to heavy rainfall with it. NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's TRMM and GPM satellites analyzed the rainfall rates occurring in Sinlaku before it made landfall while NASA's Terra satellite spotted the storm as it came ashore in Vietnam.

Tropical Storm Hagupit was just a low pressure area on Nov. 30, but warm waters and good atmospheric conditions allowed the storm to develop rapidly. By Dec. 1 the low pressure area strengthened into a tropical storm when NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead.

Tropical Depression 21W crossed the Philippines and moved into the South China Sea where warm waters helped strengthen the storm into Tropical Storm Sinlaku. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the storm and captured an image that showed it appeared elongated.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone 02S after it formed in the Southern Indian Ocean on Nov. 28. An image from Terra showed that the new tropical storm is close to Mauritius and Reunion Islands.

Astronomers have measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using a ground-based telescope for the first time. The transit of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e is the shallowest detected from the ground yet. Since detecting a transit is the first step in analyzing a planet's atmosphere, this success bodes well for characterizing the many small planets that upcoming space missions are expected to discover in the next few years.

This research is being carried out under the auspices of MAGDRIVE, a European research project coordinated by Professor José Luis Pérez Díaz, from the UC3M Instituto Pedro San Juan de Lastanosa, in which seven European entities participate. It consists of the development of a magnetic gear reducer, that is, a mechanism that transforms speed from an input axle to another in an output axle (as in a bicycle chain mechanism or the gearbox of an automobile).

Graphene's great strength appears to be determined by how well it stretches before it breaks, according to Rice University scientists who tested the material's properties by peppering it with microbullets.

The two-dimensional carbon honeycomb discovered a decade ago is thought to be much stronger than steel. But the Rice lab of materials scientist Edwin "Ned" Thomas didn't need even close to a pound of graphene to prove the material is on average 10 times better than steel at dissipating kinetic energy.

TORONTO, December 1, 2014 - For the first time, a team of astronomers - including York University Professor Ray Jayawardhana - have measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using a ground-based telescope. The transit of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e is the shallowest detected from the ground yet, and the success bodes well for characterizing the many small planets that upcoming space missions are expected to discover in the next few years.