Heavens

Infrared data gathered on the tropical low pressure area known as System 92L gave forecasters a hint that the low would become the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season's second tropical depression.

Scientists have discovered that greater mouse-eared bats use polarisation patterns in the sky to navigate – the first mammal that's known to do this.

The bats use the way the Sun's light is scattered in the atmosphere at sunset to calibrate their internal magnetic compass, which helps them to fly in the right direction, a study published in Nature Communications has shown.

Despite this breakthrough, researchers have no idea how they manage to detect polarised light.

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. Currently 160 wildfires are burning across the region. There are no plans for evacuation since these fires are endangering people or property. Weather that has been hitting the area recently comes with mixed results. The rains help to dampen the fires, but the lightning tends to start others.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have probed the extreme outskirts of the stunning elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. The galaxy's halo of stars has been found to extend much further from the galaxy's centre than expected and the stars within this halo seem to be surprisingly rich in heavy elements. This is the most remote portion of an elliptical galaxy ever to have been explored.

It's human nature to hate losing.

Unfortunately, it's also human nature to overreact to a loss, potentially abandoning a solid strategy and thus increasing your chances of losing the next time around.

That's one conclusion of a Brigham Young University study published this week by the journal Management Science. The finding is based on an analysis of two decades of data on NBA coaching decisions.

Temple’s Dr. Kamel Khalili discusses research findings which could be step one on a path toward a permanent cure for AIDS.

(Photo Credit: Temple University School of Medicine)

Source: Temple University Health System

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. Currently 160 wildfires are burning across the region. There are no plans for evacuation since these fires are endangering people or property. Weather that has been hitting the area recently comes with mixed results. The rains help to dampen the fires, but the lightning tends to start others.

Astronomers have discovered a transiting exoplanet with the longest known year. Kepler-421b circles its star once every 704 days. In comparison, Mars orbits our Sun once every 780 days. Most of the 1,800-plus exoplanets discovered to date are much closer to their stars and have much shorter orbital periods.

"Finding Kepler-421b was a stroke of luck," says lead author David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "The farther a planet is from its star, the less likely it is to transit the star from Earth's point of view. It has to line up just right."

A NASA satellite captured an image of the western quadrant of Typhoon Matmo brushing over the eastern Philippines on July 20.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Typhoon Matmo on July 20 at 02:15 UTC and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard captured a visible image of the storm. The MODIS image showed a thick band of thunderstorms west of the storm's center were sweeping over the eastern Philippines.

Terra and Aqua satellites detected 154 hotspots in areas across Riau province on Sunday, July 20, indicating forest and land fires had increased again following a decline in rainfall. The number of detected hotspots in Sunday's report was far higher than what had been reported one day prior, which had reached only 75 spots.

The hotspots were scattered in six regencies and municipalities, most of which were in northern Riau coastal areas. Smoke and the related haze it creates could potentially spread via winds to Malaysia and Singapore as it seems to be doing in this image.

The discovery that many small galaxies throughout the universe do not 'swarm' around larger ones like bees do but 'dance' in orderly disc-shaped orbits is a challenge to our understanding of how the universe formed and evolved.

The finding, by an international team of astronomers, including Professor Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney's School of Physics, has just been announced in Nature.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia have made an important step in the race to discover whether other planets could develop and sustain life.

New research published today in the journal Astrobiology shows the vital role of oceans in moderating climate on Earth-like planets.

Until now, computer simulations of habitable climates on Earth-like planets have focused on their atmospheres. But the presence of oceans is vital for optimal climate stability and habitability.

A new study led by Old Dominion University and the University of Colorado Boulder indicates sea levels likely will continue to rise in the tropical Pacific Ocean off the coasts of the Philippines and northeastern Australia as humans continue to alter the climate.

Strong thunderstorms reaching toward the top of the troposphere circled Tropical Storm Matmo's center and appeared in a band of thunderstorms on the storm's southwestern quadrant. Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed very cold temperatures that indicated the high cloud tops in the powerful storms.

New Haven, Conn. -- From the physics labs at Yale University to the bottom of a played-out gold mine in South Dakota, a new generation of dark matter experiments is ready to commence.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation recently gave the go-ahead to LUX-Zeplin (LZ), a key experiment in the hunt for dark matter, the invisible substance that may make up much of the universe. Daniel McKinsey, a professor of physics, leads a contingent of Yale scientists working on the project.