Heavens

The low pressure center that has been gyrating over the northeastern Gulf of Mexico for days has now dropped very heavy precipitation over southeastern Louisiana. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission, or GPM, core satellite gathered rainfall data on the system and looked at it in three dimensions.

Lie on the beach this summer and your body will be bombarded by about sextillion photons of light per second.

Most of these photons, or small packets of energy, originate from the Sun but a very small fraction have travelled across the Universe for billions of years before ending their existence when they collide with your skin.

In a new study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal on August 12th, astronomers have accurately measured the light hitting the Earth from outside our galaxy over a very broad wavelength range.

Combining virtual reality and treadmill training helps prevent falls in older adults better than treadmill training alone, according to a new randomised controlled trial published in The Lancet. The authors say that the intervention, which combines the physical and cognitive aspects of walking, could potentially be used in gyms, rehabilitation centres or nursing homes to improve safe walking and prevent falls in older adults or people with disorders which affect movement such as Parkinson's disease.

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Researchers who are looking for new ways to probe the nature of gravity and dark energy in the universe have adopted a new strategy: looking at what's not there.

In a paper to appear in upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, the international team of astronomers reports that they were able to achieve four times better precision in measurements of how the universe's visible matter is clustered together by studying the empty spaces in between.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered two tiny dwarf galaxies that have wandered from a vast cosmic wilderness into a nearby "big city" packed with galaxies. After being quiescent for billions of years, they are ready to party by starting a firestorm of star birth.

NASA's RapidScat instrument provided measurements of sustained wind speeds as Tropical Storm Conson continued tracking north through the northwestern Pacific Ocean.

When RapidScat passed over Conson on Aug. 10, it was near peak intensity. RapidScat measured maximum sustained winds around the center of circulation as fast as 49 mph (22 meters per second/79 kph) on Aug. 10. The RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station measures Earth's ocean surface wind speed and direction over open waters.

How do you study the topography of an asteroid millions of miles away? Map it with a robotic cartographer!

NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, will launch in September 2016 and travel to a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu to harvest a sample of surface material and return it to Earth for study. But before the science team can select a sample site, it needs to know a little something about the asteroid's topography.

For the better part of a week, a persistent, mid-level area of low pressure has been tapping into warm, moist air to produce stormy weather in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, and satellite data of rainfall was collected and calculated at NASA.

Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to 2 billion years of its early history, according to computer modeling of the planet's ancient climate by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

The findings, published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, were obtained with a model similar to the type used to predict future climate change on Earth.

Physicists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have succeeded in detecting a time-resolved supernova signal in the Earth's microfossil record. As the group of Prof. Shawn Bishop could show, the supernova signal was first detectable at a time starting about 2.7 Million years ago. According to the researcher's analyses, our solar system spent one Million years to transit trough the remnants of a supernova.

Three years ago, the Federal Trade Commission dimmed hopes for the Brightest Flashlight app for Android, slapping its developer with charges of consumer deception. Why? The app was transmitting users' locations and device IDs to third parties without telling the users or getting their permission.

Permissions, though, are only a small part of the Android- app privacy story.

WASHINGTON, DC -- Liquid methane-filled canyons hundreds of meters deep with walls as steep as ski slopes etch the surface of Titan, researchers report in a new study. The new findings provide the first direct evidence of these features on Saturn's largest moon, and could give scientists insights into Titan's origins and similar geologic processes on Earth, according to the study's authors.

Messier 18 was discovered and catalogued in 1764 by Charles Messier -- for whom the Messier Objects are named -- during his search for comet-like objects [1]. It lies within the Milky Way, approximately 4600 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius, and consists of many sibling stars loosely bound together in what is known as an open cluster.

There are several large fires burning on Portugal's Madeira Island and mainland and NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of the smoke generated from them.

This natural-color satellite image was collected by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite. VIIRS imagery identified smoke on Aug. 9 at 8:55 a.m. EDT (12:55 UTC). Actively burning areas are outlined in red.

Madeira is an archipelago of four islands located off the northwest coast of Africa. They are an autonomous region of Portugal.

NASA's RapidScat instrument provided measurements of sustained wind speeds as Tropical Storm Omais was moving past Japan.

The RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station measures Earth's ocean surface wind speed and direction over open waters. On Aug. 8 RapidScat measured surface winds on the western side of Tropical Storm Omais that were affecting central Japan.

RapidScat measured maximum sustained winds between 56 mph/25 meters per second/90 kph and 67 mph (30 meters per second/108 kph).