Heavens

PITTSBURGH—Does the Milky Way look fat in this picture? Has Andromeda been taking skinny selfies? It turns out the way some astrophysicists have been studying our galaxy made it appear that the Milky Way might be more massive than it's neighbor down the street, Andromeda.

7/29/2014, Seattle, WA. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behaviors, finds that the younger a woman is when she goes on her first diet, the more likely she is to experience several negative health outcomes later in life.

NASA infrared satellite data revealed that Tropical Storm Halong is surrounded by strong thunderstorms and an eye appears to be developing.

NASA technologists have hurdled a number of significant technological challenges in their quest to improve an already revolutionary observing technology originally created for the James Webb Space Telescope.

Political scientists have long wondered whether city governments in the U.S. are really responsive to their voters. Aren't local governments simply mired in machine politics, or under the sway of local big-money interests? Does ideology matter?

Now a uniquely comprehensive study co-authored by an MIT political scientist has produced a pair of distinctive findings: first, that the policies of city governments do closely match the politics of their citizens, and second, that this occurs regardless of the exact form of government than a city has.

The wildfires that have been plaguing the Northern Territories in Canada and have sent smoke drifting down to the Great Lakes in the U.S. continue on. NASA's Aqua satellite collected this natural-color image with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, instrument on July 26, 2014. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red. Copious amount of smoke are drifting northward in this image. Smoke is also creating havoc for residents of Yellowknife.

Two new reports that focus on the global electricity water nexus have just been published. Three years of research show that by the year 2040 there will not be enough water in the world to quench the thirst of the world population and keep the current energy and power solutions going if we continue doing what we are doing today. It is a clash of competing necessities, between drinking water and energy demand. Behind the research is a group of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Vermont Law School and CNA Corporation in the US.

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, but new research shows that industrial air pollution arrived long before any human.

Physicists have identified the "quantum glue" that underlies a promising type of superconductivity -- a crucial step towards the creation of energy superhighways that conduct electricity without current loss.

The research, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a collaboration between theoretical physicists led by Dirk Morr, professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and experimentalists led by Seamus J.C. Davis of Cornell University and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, July 28, 2014...Mothers who live near green spaces deliver babies with significantly higher birth weights, according to a new study, "Green Spaces and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes" published in the journal, Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

A team of researchers from Israel and Spain, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), evaluated nearly 40,000 single live births from a registry birth cohort in Tel Aviv, Israel to determine the impact of green surroundings during pregnancy and birth outcomes.

Tropical Storm Genevieve may be a remnant low pressure area but there's still a chance it could make a comeback. Meanwhile, GOES-West satellite imagery showed there are two developing low pressure areas "chasing" Genevieve to the east. NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center has suddenly become very busy tracking these three areas.

ANN ARBOR -- In findings that help astrophysicists understand our corner of the galaxy, an international research team has shown that the soft X-ray glow blanketing the sky comes from both inside and outside the solar system.

The source of this "diffuse X-ray background" has been debated for the past 50 years. Does it originate from the solar wind colliding with interplanetary gases within our solar system? Or is it born further away, in the "local hot bubble" of gas that a supernova is believed to have left in our galactic neighborhood about 10 million years ago?

Over the years, many adolescents have been forced to accept the diagnosis "growing pains" when they complained about pain in their knees. A new PhD study involving 3,000 adolescents has now shown that the knee pain often carries on:

"We can see from the study that one in three young people between the ages of 12 and 19 experience problems with pain in their knees. Seven percent of the adolescents experience daily knee pain in the front of the knee," says physiotherapist and PhD Michael Skovdal Rathleff from Aarhus University, and continues:

Galeazzi, who led the investigation, and his collaborators from NASA, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, the University of Kansas, the Johns Hopkins University and CNRS in France, launched a sounding rocket mission to analyze the diffuse X-ray emission, with the goal of identifying how much of that emission comes from within our solar system and how much from the local hot bubble.

Before the colonial era, 100,000s of people lived on the land now called California, and many of their cultures manipulated fire to control the availability of plants they used for food, fuel, tools, and ritual. Contemporary tribes continue to use fire to maintain desired habitat and natural resources.