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PHILADELPHIA – Amid recent discussion about the Ebola crisis in West Africa, Penn Medicine physicians say that high-income countries like the United States have an obligation to help those affected by the outbreak and to advance research to fight the deadly disease — including in the context of randomized clinical trials of new drugs to combat the virus.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11, 2014—Zooming in on diseased tissue or scanning fragile biological samples are essential tools in medicine and biological research, but this often requires peering through layers of tissue and other materials that can blur and distort the image. Certain modern microscopes can compensate for this, but only for weak aberrations or by using invasive "guide stars," imaging aids that provide a stable reference point.

After the detection of the ozone-depleting properties of CFCs in the 1970s, data from satellite measurements in 1985 startled mankind. A huge hole had been discovered over the Antarctic in the ozone layer that protects the Earth from dangerous, carcinogenic UV rays. Already in 1987 politicians around the world reached agreement on the Montreal Protocol that bans ozone-depleting substances, in particular chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). 197 states have now ratified this international treaty. A series of scientific expert reports has since accompanied the efforts to save the ozone layer.

A team led by Gastón Folatelli at the Kavli IPMU, the University of Tokyo, has found evidence of a hot binary companion star to a yellow supergiant star, which had become a bright supernova. The existence of the companion star had been predicted by the same team on the basis of numerical calculations. This finding provides the last link in a chain of observations that have so far supported the team's theoretical picture for this supernova.

SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane and a team of researchers presented today the definition of a "Venus Zone," the area around a star in which a planet is likely to exhibit the unlivable conditions found on the planet Venus.

Identification of planets orbiting distant stars is spurring the search for an Earth-like planet. Now a team of researchers has developed a way to distinguish a distant Venus-like planet from an Earth-like one.

"We want to know how common Venus-like planets are," said Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, research associate in geosciences, Penn State. "We also want to know how common solar systems like ours are."

Pasadena, CA—Quasars are supermassive black holes that live at the center of distant massive galaxies. They shine as the most luminous beacons in the sky across the entire electromagnetic spectrum by rapidly accreting matter into their gravitationally inescapable centers. New work from Carnegie's Hubble Fellow Yue Shen and Luis Ho of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University solves a quasar mystery that astronomers have been puzzling over for 20 years.

This simulated flyby of NASA's TRMM satellite on Sept. 8 saw rain falling at a rate of over 62 mm (2.4 inches) per hour in some downpours over Arizona. Some thunderstorm tops reached heights of 13.5 km (about 8.4 miles).

Image Credit:SSAI/NASA, Hal Pierce

Objects in space tend to spin — and spin in a way that's totally different from the way they spin on earth. Understanding how objects are spinning, where their centers of mass are, and how their mass is distributed is crucial to any number of actual or potential space missions, from cleaning up debris in the geosynchronous orbit favored by communications satellites to landing a demolition crew on a comet.

The Eastern Pacific Ocean continues to turn out tropical cyclones and NASA's Aqua satellite caught the birth of the fifteenth tropical depression on September 10 and shortly afterward, it strengthened into a tropical storm and was renamed Odile.

The 790 Fire in Oregon began as a lightning strike on July 31, 2014. Over 3,000 acres have been affected by this fire which is 54% contained. In the next 12 to 48 hours there is a potential risk to Sky Lakes Wilderness and natural resources including the Northern Spotted Owl habitat, Coho habitat, water quality, the Pacific Crest Trail, and Cherry Creek Research Natural Area. Area and trail closures exist on the Pacific Crest Trail. The weather is not helping the fire fighters with gusty winds and low relative humidity.

The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 1:48 p.m. EDT on Sept. 10, 2014. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the event.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground. However -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

Lower rates of suicide are associated with more daily sunshine in the prior 14 to 60 days.

Light interacts with brain serotonin systems and possibly influences serotonin-related behaviors. Those behaviors, such as mood and impulsiveness, can play a role in suicide.

University of Cincinnati geography researchers have developed a large-scale mapping technique to track a variety of demographic data across the United States, including researching populations based on gender, race and economic diversity. Details on the technique behind the new, high resolution, grid-based map of U.S. demographics developed by Anna Dmowska, a postdoctoral fellow for UC's Space Informatics Lab, and Tomasz Stepinski, the Thomas Jefferson Chair Professor of Space Exploration at UC, are published in this month's issue of Applied Geography.

Rice University wireless researchers have found a way to make the most of the unused UHF TV spectrum by serving up fat streams of data over wireless hotspots that could stretch for miles.

In a presentation today at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2014 conference in Maui, Hawaii, researchers from Rice's Wireless Network Group will unveil a multiuser, multiantenna transmission scheme for UHF, a portion of the radio spectrum that is traditionally reserved for television broadcasts.