Heavens

CAMBRIDGE, MD (September 2, 2014)—The Susquehanna Flats, a large bed of underwater grasses near the mouth of the Susquehanna River, virtually disappeared from the upper Chesapeake Bay after Tropical Storm Agnes more than 40 years ago. However, the grasses mysteriously began to come back in the early 2000s. Today, the bed is one of the biggest and healthiest in the Bay, spanning some 20 square miles. A new study by scientists at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science explores what's behind this major comeback.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Cellphone apps that find users car rides in real time are exploding in popularity: The car-service company Uber was recently valued at $18 billion, and even as it faces legal wrangles, a number of companies that provide similar services with licensed taxi cabs have sprung up.

What if the taxi-service app on your cellphone had a button on it that let you indicate that you were willing to share a ride with another passenger? How drastically could cab-sharing reduce traffic, fares, and carbon dioxide emissions?

New research launched today, 1st September 2014, has concluded that there are seven key issues that need to be addressed to ensure the future success of doctor revalidation, the most profound revision in medical regulation since the Medical Act of 1858.

When they are not busy attacking us, germs go after each other. But when viruses invade bacteria, it doesn't always spell disaster for the infected microbes: Sometimes viruses actually carry helpful genes that a bacterium can harness to, say, expand its diet or better attack its own hosts.

In other runs of the simulation, Krumholz and Feng observed that even clouds that do not turn much of their gas into stars—as the Sun's parent cloud probably didn't—still produce stars with nearly-identical abundances. "We've provided the missing physical explanation of how and why chemical mixing works, and shown convincingly that the chemical mixing process is very general and rapid even in an environment which did not yield a star cluster, like the one where the Sun must have formed," said Krumholz.

Krumholz and UC Santa Cruz graduate student Yi Feng used supercomputers to simulate two streams of interstellar gas coming together to form a cloud that, over the course of a few million years, collapses under its own gravity to make a cluster of stars. Studies of interstellar gas show much greater variation in chemical abundances than is seen among stars within the same open star cluster. To represent this variation, the researchers added "tracer dyes" to the two gas streams in the simulations.

Barcelona, Spain – Saturday 30 August 2014: A new method to predict the optimal number and location of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) was presented at ESC Congress today by Dr Benjamin Dahan from France. According to the predictive method, Paris needs 350 AEDs located in public places for optimal prevention of out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA).

Satellite imagery shows Hurricane Cristobal racing through the North Atlantic on Friday, August 29 while losing its tropical characteristics. An image from NOAA's GOES-East satellite showed Cristobal headed south of Greenland. The previous day, NASA's TRMM satellite saw heavy rainfall occurring in the hurricane.

The first analysis of space dust collected by a special collector onboard NASA's Stardust mission and sent back to Earth for study in 2006 suggests the tiny specks open a door to studying the origins of the solar system and possibly the origin of life itself.

A group of astrophysicists, including researchers from MIPT, have detected the formation of radioactive cobalt during a supernova explosion, lending credence to a corresponding theory of supernova explosions. Details are given in the journal Nature, one of the most cited scientific publications in the world.

A space weather storm from the sun engulfed our planet on Jan. 21, 2005. The event got its start on Jan. 20, when a cloud of solar material, a coronal mass ejection or CME, burst off the sun and headed toward Earth. When it arrived at our planet, the ring current and radiation belts surrounding Earth swelled with extra particles, while the aurora persisted for six hours. Both of these are usually signs of a very large storm – indeed, this was one of the largest outpouring of solar protons ever monitored from the sun.

LEBANON, NH ­– As the federal government plans its exit strategy from the war, now may be the time for it to rethink its role in providing health care to veterans, says a Perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"To simply go on doing more of the same is to fail to recognize the challenge that the Veterans Health Administration's cost and population structure pose in the longer run," said William Weeks, from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, and David Auerbach, from the RAND Corporation, in the August issue of NEJM.

Astronomers have used a worldwide network of radio telescopes to resolve a controversy over the distance to a famous star cluster -- a controversy that posed a potential challenge to scientists' basic understanding of how stars form and evolve. The new work shows that the measurement made by a cosmic-mapping research satellite was wrong.

The Caribbean Islands of Turks and Caicos were drenched from Tropical Storm Cristobal before the storm moved north and intensified into a hurricane. NASA's TRMM satellite added up the rainfall and revealed the soaking those islands received.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite is like a flying rain gauge in space. It can estimate rainfall throughout storms on Earth from its orbit around the planet. TRMM is managed by both NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency known as JAXA and has been in orbit since 1997 covering the tropics.

NASA's airborne Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel, or HS3, mission kicked off on August 27 when one of the remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft flew a "lawnmower" or back and forth pattern over Hurricane Cristobal while gathering data using dropsondes and two other instruments. The Global Hawk dropped 81 dropsondes over Cristobal. A dropsonde is a device that measures winds, temperature, pressure and humidity as it falls from the aircraft to the surface.