Heavens

An international team of researchers analyzing decades of observations from many facilities, including NASA's Swift satellite, has discovered an unusual source of light in a galaxy some 90 million light-years away.

Tropical Storm Adjali started curving to the southwest on its trek through the Southern Indian Ocean when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead on Nov. 19.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Tropical Storm Adjali on Nov. 19 at 9:05 UTC (4:05 a.m. EST). The MODIS image showed that the storm began curving to the southwest, and despite slight weakening, thunderstorms circled around the low-level center.

In his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein predicted that there are such things as gravitational waves. In fact, the very existence of these waves is the linchpin of the entire theory. Despite the great lengths that physicists have gone to in recent decades, however, they still have not managed to detect them directly with a measurement. This could largely be due to the fact that this requires a level of precision that it is practically impossible to achieve with today's measuring devices.

A new report from the Research Alliance for New York City Schools gives a first look at patterns of college enrollment, persistence, and completion for New York City high school students.

Researchers from China, the Philippines and LSTM have today published a new systematic review of reminder systems to improve patient adherence to tuberculosis (TB) treatment. Reminder systems include prompts in advance of a forthcoming appointment to help ensure the patients attend, and also actions when people miss an appointment, such as phoning them or arranging a home visit. This review is the latest in a suite of reviews produced by authors from the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, hosted at LSTM, evaluating interventions to improve adherence to TB treatment.

If it's help a woman needs, maybe she should wear high heels. That's the message from Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, after he observed how helpful men are towards women in high heels versus those wearing flat, sensible shoes. The study, published in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the first ever to investigate how the height of a woman's shoe heel influences how men behave towards her.

Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centres. These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together.

WASHINGTON, DC-- Small volcanic eruptions might eject more of an atmosphere-cooling gas into Earth's upper atmosphere than previously thought, potentially contributing to the recent slowdown in global warming, according to a new study.

When NASA's Terra satellite passed over the Southern Indian Ocean, the MODIS instrument aboard captured a picture of Tropical Cyclone Adjali that showed it developed a "tail," which is actually band of thunderstorms extending south of the center.

A new study has shown for the first time how people can be trained to "see" letters of the alphabet as colours in a way that simulates how those with synaesthesia experience their world.

The University of Sussex research, published today (18 November 2014) in Scientific Reports, also found that the training might potentially boost IQ.

In 1966, it was Roger Penrose who won the prestigious Adams Prize for his essay "An analysis of the structure of space-time." The Adams Prize - named after the British mathematician John Couch Adams - is awarded each year by the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge to a young, UK-based mathematician. At the same time, Steven Hawking won an auxiliary to the Adams Prize for an essay entitled Singularities and the Geometry of Spacetime, shortly after completing his PhD. A copy of the original Hawking submission has now been reproduced in EPJ H.

Young people growing up in impoverished neighborhoods who perceive their poor communities in a positive light report better health and well-being than those with worse perceptions of where they live, new research led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests.

Results of a new study challenge the current consensus in cardiology that peak myocardial edema, or heart muscle swelling, only occurs just after a myocardial infarction, or heart attack. In the study, presented as a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2014 and published simultaneously in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), scientists discovered a second wave of swelling and inflammation occurs within a week of a heart attack.

A team of 14 scientists led by David Williams of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration has completed the first global geologic and tectonic map of the asteroid Vesta. The work reveals that Vesta's history has been dominated by impacts from large meteorites.

The mapping was carried out using images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which orbited Vesta between June 2011 and September 2012. The images let scientists create high-resolution geological maps, revealing the variety of Vesta's surface features in unprecedented detail.

People who work the night shift are likely burning less energy during a 24-hour period than those on a normal schedule, increasing their risk for weight gain and obesity, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

Researchers have known that people who work, and therefore eat, at night when their bodies are biologically prepared to sleep are prone to put on pounds. But the reasons have not been clear.