Heavens

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (June 29, 2014) – A novel metamaterial enables a fast, efficient and high-fidelity terahertz radiation imaging system capable of manipulating the stubborn electromagnetic waves, advancing a technology with potential applications in medical and security imaging, a team led by Boston College researchers reports in the online edition of the journal Nature Photonics.

Climate scientists have long tried to explain why ice-age cycles became longer and more intense some 900,000 years ago, switching from 41,000-year cycles to 100,000-year cycles.

In a paper published this week in the journal Science, researchers report that the deep ocean currents that move heat around the globe stalled or may have stopped at that time, possibly due to expanding ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere.

Facebook has more than 1.23 billion active users worldwide, with over 50 per cent of all users logging on to it on any given day. Most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising and the company is looking at ways to make the site a more effective advertising platform for marketers. This includes selling ads that are more targeted to their users.

For decades, climate scientists have tried to explain why ice-age cycles became longer and more intense about 900,000 years ago, switching from 41,000-year cycles to 100,000-year cycles. In a new study in the leading journal Science, researchers found that the deep ocean currents that move heat around the globe stalled or even stopped, possibly due to expanding ice cover in the north.

Anyone living in a major U.S. city for the past decade may have noticed a change in the air. The change is apparent in new NASA satellite images unveiled this week that demonstrate the reduction of air pollution across the country.

After ten years in orbit, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite has been in orbit sufficiently long to show that people in major U.S. cities are breathing less nitrogen dioxide – a yellow-brown gas that can cause respiratory problems.

The hunt for dark matter has taken another step forward thanks to new supercomputer simulations showing the evolution of our "local Universe" from the Big Bang to the present day.

Physicists at Durham University, UK, who are leading the research, say their simulations could improve understanding of dark matter, a mysterious substance believed to make up 85 per cent of the mass of the Universe.

Professor Carlos Frenk, Director of Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, said: "I've been losing sleep over this for the last 30 years.

Surrounding the sun is a vast atmosphere of solar particles, through which magnetic fields swarm, solar flares erupt, and gigantic columns of material rise, fall and jostle each other around. Now, using NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, scientists have found that this atmosphere, called the corona, is even larger than thought, extending out some 5 million miles above the sun's surface -- the equivalent of 12 solar radii.

Space may appear empty -- a soundless vacuum, but it's not an absolute void. It flows with electric activity that is not visible to our eyes. NASA is developing plans to send humans to an asteroid, and wants to know more about the electrical environment explorers will encounter there.

Natural resources worth more than US$40 Trillion must be accounted forGovernments and companies must do more to account for their impact and dependence on the natural environment - according to researchers at the University of East Anglia.

New research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change reveals that although some companies like Puma and Gucci are leading the way, more needs to be done to foster a sustainable green economy.

The discovery of three closely orbiting supermassive black holes in a galaxy more than four billion light years away could help astronomers in the search for gravitational waves: the 'ripples in spacetime' predicted by Einstein.

3,500 million years ago the Martian crater Gale, through which the NASA rover Curiosity is currently traversing, was covered with glaciers, mainly over its central mound. Very cold liquid water also flowed through its rivers and lakes on the lower-lying areas, forming landscapes similar to those which can be found in Iceland or Alaska. This is reflected in an analysis of the images taken by the spacecraft orbiting the red planet.

TORONTO, June 25, 2014–As the first people with HIV grow old, a new study from St. Michael's Hospital questions whether the health care system and other government policies are prepared to meet their complex medical and social needs.

In high-income countries such as Canada, 30 per cent of people living with HIV are 50 or older, and many are living into their 60s and 70s. In San Francisco, more than half the people with HIV are over 50.

The gradually increasing complexity of user requirements and runtime environments of software demands software to be of more capabilities and thus become more complex than ever. In the past several decades, there was a trend that the scale of software has been increasing continuously. Nowadays, there are tens or even hundreds of million lines of code in a large scale software system.

Optimality principles have been used, in a holistic approach, to describe flow processes in several important geosystems. Optimality principles refer to the state of a physical system that is controlled by an optimal condition subject to physical and/or resource constraints.

While significant successes have been achieved in applying them, some principles appear to contradict each other.

The solar array that will provide power to NOAA's GOES-R satellite has been tested, approved and shipped to a facility where it will be incorporated on the spacecraft. The five sections of the solar array come together as one to resemble a giant black wing.

On May 13, 2014, the GOES-R satellite solar array panels were successful deployed in a Lockheed Martin clean room in Sunnyvale, California. The completed solar array was then delivered to Lockheed Martin's facility near Denver.