Heavens

An ice skating blade that informs figure skaters of the stresses they are imposing on their joints has been developed by a group of researchers in the US.

The small, lightweight device has been built to measure the force that a figure skater exerts on the ice when performing their repertoire of jumps and spins and could potentially be used by skaters and their trainers to avoid injuries, as well as inform the design of new skating boots.

The instrumented blade has been presented today, 21 October, in IOP Publishing's journal Measurement Science and Technology.

Tropical Storm Gonzalo strengthened into a hurricane on Oct. 14 when it was near Puerto Rico and provided a natural laboratory for the next phase of NASA's HS3 or Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel mission.

The WB-57 aircraft flew over Hurricane Gonzalo on Oct. 15 carrying two HS3 mission instruments called HIWRAP and HIRAD in addition to a new Office of Naval Research sponsored dropsonde system.

This NASA satellite image is of the Egyptian River Delta. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red. Each hot spot, which appears as a red mark, is an area where the thermal detectors on the MODIS instrument recognized temperatures higher than background. When accompanied by plumes of smoke, as in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for fire. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires in this image and confirmation from the Ministry of Environment in Egypt.

The next morning the sky was clear and the ocean was calm. Although my neighborhood didn't suffer much damage, other than a few electric wires falling, other areas of the island had fallen light poles, wires and trees, crushed fences and walls. Some homes had roofs that fell in or came completely off. I'm amazed at how many trees were uprooted or fallen over across the island."

By October 18, Gonzalo had moved north of Bermuda and was headed toward eastern Canada.

Tropical Storm Trudy formed on Saturday, Oct. 17 and by Oct.19 the storm made landfall in southern Mexico and weakened to a remnant low pressure area.

Tropical Storm Trudy formed near the southwestern coast of Mexico during the morning of Oct. 18 triggering warnings and watches. A Hurricane Watch was posted from east of Acapulco to Laguna De Chacahua Mexico and a Tropical Storm Warning was posted for Tecpan De Galeana to Laguna De Chacahua Mexico.

Boulder, CO, USA — Venus is hiding something beneath its brilliant shroud of clouds: a first order mystery about the planet that researchers may be a little closer to solving because of a new re-analysis of twenty-year-old spacecraft data.

ANN ARBOR—In a design that mimics a hard-to-duplicate texture of starfish shells, University of Michigan engineers have made rounded crystals that have no facets.

"We call them nanolobes. They look like little hot air balloons that are rising from the surface," said Olga Shalev, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering who worked on the project.

Both the nanolobes' shape and the way they're made have promising applications, the researchers say. The geometry could potentially be useful to guide light in advanced LEDs, solar cells and nonreflective surfaces.

What does a 1980s experimental aircraft have to do with state-of-the art quantum technology? Lots, as shown by new research from the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney, and published in Nature Physics today.

Over several years a team of scientists has taken inspiration from aerospace research and development programs to make unusually shaped experimental aircraft fly.

Head Start programs may help low-income parents improve their educational status, according to a new study by Northwestern University researchers.

The study is one of the first to examine whether a child's participation in the federal program benefits mothers and fathers – in particular parents' educational attainment and employment.

Using instruments aboard the Cassini spacecraft to measure the wobbles of Mimas, the closest of Saturn's regular moons, a Cornell University astronomer publishing in Science, Oct. 17, has inferred that this small moon's icy surface cloaks either a rugby ball-shaped rocky core or a sloshing sub-surface ocean.

Available for download today, the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) and Allianza MREDD+ released the first detailed map of aboveground forest carbon stocks of Mexico. This carbon stock inventory is very valuable for Mexico, as one of the first tropical nations to voluntarily pledge to mitigation actions within the context of the United Nation's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) program.

Peering through a giant cosmic magnifying glass, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a tiny, faint galaxy -- one of the farthest galaxies ever seen. The diminutive object is estimated to be more than 13 billion light-years away.

This galaxy offers a peek back to the very early formative years of the universe and may just be the tip of the iceberg.

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) has provided scientists with five new findings into how the sun's atmosphere, or corona, is heated far hotter than its surface, what causes the sun's constant outflow of particles called the solar wind, and what mechanisms accelerate particles that power solar flares.

A new study using a reconstruction of North American drought history over the last 1,000 years found that the drought of 1934 was the driest and most widespread of the last millennium.

Using a tree-ring-based drought record from the years 1000 to 2005 and modern records, scientists from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the runner-up drought (in 1580) and extended across 71.6 percent of western North America. For comparison, the average extent of the 2012 drought was 59.7 percent.

A group of researchers led by Melina Bersten of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe recently presented a model that provides the first characterization of the progenitor for a hydrogen-deficient supernova. Their model predicts that a bright hot star, which is the binary companion to an exploding object, remains after the explosion. To verify their theory, the group secured observation time with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to search for such a remaining star.