Heavens

A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have gone looking for water vapour in the atmospheres of three planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun – and have come up nearly dry.

The three planets, HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b, are between 60 and 900 light-years away, and are all gas giants known as 'hot Jupiters.' These worlds are so hot, with temperatures between 900 to 2200 degrees Celsius, that they are ideal candidates for detecting water vapour in their atmospheres.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. – Honey bees, especially the young, are highly sensitive to temperature and to protect developing bees, adults work together to maintain temperatures within a narrow range. Recently published research led by Philip T. Starks, a biologist at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences, is the first to show that worker bees dissipate excess heat within a hive in process similar to how humans and other mammals cool themselves through their blood vessels and skin.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Typhoon Matmo when it was moving through the Taiwan Strait for its final landfall in mainland China.

Environment Canada has issued a high health risk warning for Yellowknife and surrounding area because of heavy smoke in the region due to forest fires. In the image taken by the Aqua satellite, the smoke is drifting eastward along normal wind patterns. Fire is an obvious health hazard, but the smoke that comes from fires is not quite so obvious and its effects are insidious.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In 2012, the Voyager mission team announced that the Voyager 1 spacecraft had passed into interstellar space, traveling further from Earth than any other manmade object.

A sulfur-oxidizing bacterial group called SUP05 will play an increasingly important role in carbon and nutrient cycling in the world's oceans as oxygen minimum zones expand, according to research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

University of British Columbia researchers plumbed the depth of a seasonally anoxic fjord, Canada's Saanich Inlet, to chart how microbial community metabolism changes as oxygen minimum zones form.

A researcher from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Prof. Vladimir Krasnopolsky, who heads the Laboratory of High Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy of Planetary Atmospheres, has published the results of the comparison of his model of Titan's atmosphere with the latest data.

FALLS CHURCH, Va. -- U.S. workplaces may need to consider innovative methods to prevent fatigue from developing in employees who are obese. Based on results from a new study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene (JOEH), workers who are obese may have significantly shorter endurance times when performing workplace tasks, compared with their non-obese counterparts.

Animals can use varying sensory modalities for orientation, some of which might be very different from ours. Some bird species for example take the polarization pattern produced by sunlight in the atmosphere to calibrate their orientation systems. Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and Queen's University Belfast have discovered with colleagues from Israel that a night active mammal, the greater mouse-eared bat, has the capability to orient using polarized light.

A new home-grown instrument based on bundles of optical fibres is giving Australian astronomers the first 'Google street view' of the cosmos — incredibly detailed views of huge numbers of galaxies.

Developed by researchers at the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, the optical-fibre bundles can sample the light from up to 60 parts of a galaxy, for a dozen galaxies at a time.

This beautiful star cluster, NGC 3293, is found 8000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina (The Keel). This cluster was first spotted by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751, during his stay in what is now South Africa, using a tiny telescope with an aperture of just 12 millimetres. It is one of the brightest clusters in the southern sky and can be easily seen with the naked eye on a dark clear night.

"Astronomers have long suspected millisecond pulsars were spun up through the transfer and accumulation of matter from their companion stars, so we often refer to them as recycled pulsars," explained Anne Archibald, a postdoctoral researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) in Dwingeloo who discovered J1023 in 2007.

The Carlton Complex fires started on July 14, 2014, by lightning from a weather system that moved through the Methow Valley. The Carlton Complex consists of four fires: Stokes Fire, Gold Hikes Fire, French Creek Fire and the Cougar Flat. The Stokes and Gold Hikes fires are now one larger fire. The fires are burning in timber and grass and the area burning is currently over 243,000 acres in size. The present fire situation continues to rapidly change due to the high fire danger. Public and firefighter safety is the priority on the Carlton Complex fires.

Two instruments aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided different views of Typhoon Matmo on its approach to Taiwan today, July 22.

NASA's TRMM satellite measured up Super Typhoon Rammasun's rainfall rates, rainfall totals and cloud heights providing a look at the inner workings and aftermath of the storm.

Super Typhoon Rammasun struck the southern coast of China on Friday, July 18 as a very powerful super typhoon with sustained winds estimated at 135 knots (~155 mph or equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane on the US Saffir-Simpson scale), making it the strongest typhoon to hit the area in several decades.