Heavens

DURHAM, N.C. -- Allowing polluters to buy, sell or trade water-quality credits could significantly reduce pollution in river basins and estuaries faster and at lower cost than requiring the facilities to meet compliance costs on their own, a new Duke University-led study finds.

The scale and type of the trading programs, though critical, may matter less than just getting them started.

Tropical Depression Fung-Wong skirted the coast of mainland China and is moving through the East China Sea. NASA's Aqua satellite captured cloud top temperature data that showed strongest thunderstorms were stretched out as the storm continues to look more frontal in nature.

The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" — was signed into law in 2010 and promised the largest overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system since the 1960s. Designed to provide medical care to uninsured Americans, it has been widely decried as an unwarranted intrusion into the affairs of private businesses and individuals.

In previous studies, gene circuits with predefined behaviors have been successfully built and modeled, but mostly on a case-by-case basis. In this study published in Nature Communications, researchers from the EMBL/CRG Systems Biology Research Unit at the CRG, went beyond individual networks and explored both computational and synthetic mechanisms for a complete set of 3-node stripe-forming networks in Escherichia coli.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Racially and economically mixed cities are more likely to stay integrated if the density of households stays low, finds a new analysis of a now-famous model of segregation.

Arctic sea ice coverage continued its below-average trend this year as the ice declined to its annual minimum on Sept. 17, according to the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Thanks to new LEGO®-like components developed by researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, it is now possible to build a 3-D microfluidic system quickly and cheaply by simply snapping together small modules by hand.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A surprising new study pulls back the curtain on one of the most contentious issues in health care: differences in payment and income between physicians who perform operations, procedures or tests, and those who don't.

Contrary to perception, the research indicates, the physician payment system is not inherently "rigged" to favor surgeons and other procedure-performing doctors.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have observed what may be the first-ever signs of windy weather around a T Tauri star, an infant analog of our own Sun. This may help explain why some T Tauri stars have disks that glow weirdly in infrared light while others shine in a more expected fashion.

Most of the fires captured in this image burn in Khabarovsk Krai, a territory occupying the coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk. Dozens of red hotspots, accompanied by plumes of smoke mark active fires. The smoke, which appears mostly white or grey, blows to the east towards the Sea of Okhotsk. Taiga and tundra are found in the north of this area, swampy forest inhabit the central depression, and deciduous forests are the natural vegetation in the south.

Infrared satellite imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed only a swirl of low-level clouds some deep clouds around Polo's weakening center on Sept. 22 as the storm weakened to a depression.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard Aqua gathered infrared data on Polo on Sept. 22 at 5:11 a.m. EDT, reading cloud top temperatures. There was a small area of high clouds, indicating that most thunderstorms in the depression had weakened or already dissipated except for that area.

No one has ever directly observed gravitational waves, phenomena predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and such a discovery would have profound implications for the study of the Universe. Last March, however, the team behind the BICEP2 project made a ground-breaking announcement: the Antarctic observatory had detected a signal referable to gravitational waves. The study claimed to have excluded possible contaminants (other sources that could have generated the same signal) and that the observation was therefore to be considered genuine.

Evacuations of 2,819 people have occurred in the wake of the huge King Fire blazing out of control near the Eldorado National Forest. The King Fire is burning in steep terrain in the South Fork of the American River Canyon, Silver Creek Canyon, and the Rubicon Canyon, north of the community of Pollock Pines. The fire has crossed into Placer County and burned onto the Tahoe National Forest north of the Eldorado National Forest. The anticipated spread is expected to be minimal on Sept. 22 due to thunderstorms that moved through the area overnight, bringing lightning and rain.

During the week of Sept. 15, Hurricane Odile and its weakened remnants produced heavy rainfall that caused dangerous flooding over Mexico's Baja California peninsula and southwestern United States. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite gathers data on rainfall that was used to create a map that showed estimated totals that in one case neared almost three feet!

Some of Odile's may have been welcomed in the U.S. Southwest where some areas have been experiencing extreme to exceptional drought conditions, but some was extreme and led to flooding.

Tropical Storm Fung-Wong weakened over the weekend of Sept. 20-21 as it moved over Taiwan and approached Shanghai, China.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of Tropical Storm Fung-Wong when it was approaching Taiwan on Sept. 20 at 1:35 a.m. EDT.

On Sunday, Sept. 21, Tropical Storm Fung-Wong was over Taiwan. It was centered at 26.0 north latitude and 122.0 east longitude, just 60 miles north-northeast of Taipei, Taiwan and moving to the north. Maximum sustained winds were near 50 knots (57 knots/92.6 kph).