Heavens

San Antonio -- Aug. 4, 2014 -- Scientists yesterday highlighted an impressive list of achievements in researching the outer heliosphere at the 40th International Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Scientific Assembly in Moscow.

Growing consensus on climate and land use change means that it is reasonable to assume, at the very least, that flood levels in a region may change. Then why, ask Rosner et al. in a new study, do the dominant risk assessment techniques used to decide whether to build new flood protection infrastructure nearly always start with an assumption of "no trend" in flood behavior?

Last year, the Planck Telescope revealed the most detailed picture of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang. But this map contains features that challenge the standard model of cosmology, the theory that describes our entire Universe from early on. Who is right, the map or the theory? Scientists from EPFL (Switzerland) and CEA (France) have shown that several of these enigmatic features disappear from the map by processing Planck telescope's data differently and including other effects, such as the motion of the Milky Way.

Tropical Storm Bertha took a "vacation" in the Bahamas on August 3 and NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of the storm that appeared be centered over "Crooked Island."

On August 2, before Bertha visited the Bahamas, the western half of the storm passed over Puerto Rico. A visible image captured by NASA's Terra satellite showed Bertha's clouds stretched from Puerto Rico east, over the British Virgin Islands. NOAA's National Weather Service office in San Juan, Puerto Rico reported 1.36 inches of rainfall from Bertha on August 2.

PHILADELPHIA — Consumption of a type of starch that acts like fiber may help reduce colorectal cancer risk associated with a high red meat diet, according to a study published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

In addition to having a lower cost, sounding rockets offer a valuable test bed for new technology that may subsequently be flown on longer-term space missions. Another advantage of sounding rockets is that the instruments parachute back to the ground so they can be recovered and re-used. The EUNIS mission will be re-tuned to focus on a different set of solar wavelengths – ones that can also spot the extremely high temperature material representative of nanoflares -- and fly again sometime in 2016.

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is not as easy to predict the path or track it experimentally as a straight-line between two points would be in our everyday, classical world.

Topological transport of light is the photonic analog of topological electron flow in certain semiconductors. In the electron case, the current flows around the edge of the material but not through the bulk. It is "topological" in that even if electrons encounter impurities in the material the electrons will continue to flow without losing energy.

A train of developing tropical low pressure areas stretch from the Eastern Pacific Ocean into the Central Pacific and they were captured in an image from NOAA's GOES-West satellite on August 1. The train of five tropical lows include the remnants of Tropical Storm Genevieve and newly developed Tropical Storm Iselle.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) the National Hurricane Center noted that the center of Tropical Storm Bertha was located near latitude 14.0 north and longitude 58.9 west, about 70 miles (110 km) southeast of Barbados. It was moving toward the west-northwest near 21 mph (33 kph) and that general motion is expected to continue for the next couple of days. NHC noted that Bertha is expected to move through the central Lesser Antilles during the night (August 1) and approach the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico on Saturday, August 2. The estimated minimum central pressure is 1008 millibars.

NASA satellite data showed Tropical Storm Halong's "best side" or most powerful side was east of its center. That's where the coldest cloud top temperatures and strongest thunderstorms appeared on satellite imagery.

Tropical Storm Iselle was born in the Eastern Pacific Ocean soon after NASA's Aqua satellite gathered infrared imagery on the storm that showed powerful thunderstorms wrapping into developing storm's center. Iselle is not close enough to land to cause any watches or warnings.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Researchers at MIT and in Saudi Arabia have developed a new way of making surfaces that can actively control how fluids or particles move across them. The work might enable new kinds of biomedical or microfluidic devices, or solar panels that could automatically clean themselves of dust and grit.

Having a companion in old age is good for people — and, it turns out, might extend the chance for life on certain Earth-sized planets in the cosmos as well.

Planets cool as they age. Over time their molten cores solidify and inner heat-generating activity dwindles, becoming less able to keep the world habitable by regulating carbon dioxide to prevent runaway heating or cooling.

In this month's issue of Physics World, Ashley Dale from the University of Bristol warns of the "catastrophic" and "long-lasting" impacts of "solar super-storms" and the dangers we face if the threat continues to go unnoticed.