Heavens

Beneath the barren whiteness of Greenland, a mysterious world has popped into view. Using ice-penetrating radar, researchers have discovered ragged blocks of ice as tall as city skyscrapers and as wide as the island of Manhattan at the very bottom of the ice sheet, apparently formed as water beneath the ice refreezes and warps the surrounding ice upwards.

The newly revealed forms may help scientists understand more about how ice sheets behave and how they will respond to a warming climate. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience.

CINCINNATI—Investigators at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found a therapy that reverses new onset Type 1 diabetes in mouse models and may advance efforts in combating the disease among humans.

The study, led by William Ridgway, MD, was presented Saturday, June 14, 2014, at the American Diabetes Association's 74th Scientific Sessions in San Francisco.

ITHACA, N.Y. – When it hasn't been your day – your week, your month, or even your year – it might be time to turn to Facebook friends for a little positive reinforcement. According to a new study by social scientists at Cornell University, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Facebook, emotions can spread among users of online social networks.

June 14, 2014 (San Francisco) – Improving the overall quality of one's diet helps to prevent type 2 diabetes, independent of other lifestyle changes, according to a study presented at the American Diabetes Association's 74th Scientific Sessions®.

If the icy surface of Pluto's giant moon Charon is cracked, analysis of the fractures could reveal if its interior was warm, perhaps warm enough to have maintained a subterranean ocean of liquid water, according to a new NASA-funded study.

Pluto is an extremely distant world, orbiting the sun more than 29 times farther than Earth. With a surface temperature estimated to be about 380 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (around minus 229 degrees Celsius), the environment at Pluto is far too cold to allow liquid water on its surface. Pluto's moons are in the same frigid environment.

NASA scientists have created a new recipe that captures key flavors of the brownish-orange atmosphere around Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

The recipe is used for lab experiments designed to simulate Titan's chemistry. With this approach, the team was able to classify a previously unidentified material discovered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in the moon's smoggy haze.

Friday the thirteenth proved unlucky for Nanauk as environmental conditions worsened and tore the storm apart. By 09:00 UTC (5 a.m. EDT), the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) issued their final warning on the tropical cyclone. At that time, maximum sustained winds were near 35 knots (40 mph/65 kph) and weakening quickly. The storm's last official position was at 21.3 north latitude and 64.3 east longitude, about 285 nautical miles (328 miles/528 km) southwest of Karachi, Pakistan. At that time the dissipating storm was moving to the north at 9 knots (10 mph/~17 kph).

Hurricane Cristina intensified rapidly on June 12 and infrared satellite data showed cloud top temperatures became extremely cold as thunderstorms towered to the top of the troposphere. One day later, Cristina was weakening quickly and infrared data showed cloud top temperatures were warming as the cloud tops dropped.

Referees may soon have a new way of determining whether a football team has scored a touchdown or gotten a first down. Researchers from North Carolina State University and Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with Disney Research, have developed a system that can track a football in three-dimensional space using low-frequency magnetic fields.

Tropical Cyclone Nanauk is holding its own for now as it moves through the Arabian Sea. NASA's Aqua satellite took its cloud top temperatures to determine its health.

When the TRMM satellite flew over Cristina on June 11, 2014 at 1142 UTC (4:42 a.m. PDT) it was a hurricane. A rainfall analysis that used data from TRMM's Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) instruments was overlaid on an enhanced infrared image received by NOAA's GOES-East satellite at 1145 UTC (7:45 a.m. EDT) to provide a complete picture of the hurricane's cloud extent and rainfall rates. The TRMM TMI data clearly revealed that an eye had developed indicating that Cristina was definitely a hurricane.

Research findings presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) suggest that exercise transiently suppresses local and systemic inflammation, reinforcing the beneficial effects of exercise and the need for this to be regular in order to achieve clinical efficacy in rheumatic disease.

Children of parents who use subsidies to purchase center-based care in the toddler years are more likely to be enrolled in Head Start or public prekindergarten in their preschool years, according to a new study. The research, conducted at Georgetown University and Columbia University, appears in the journal Child Development.

The first ecological study of an entire glacier has found that microbes drastically reduce surface reflectivity and have a non-negligible impact on the amount of sunlight that is reflected into space.

The research, led by the University of Leeds and published today [12 June] in the journal FEMS Microbiology Ecology, will help improve climate change models that have previously neglected the role of microbes in darkening the Earth's surface.

The world of astronomy has changed. An astronomer used to have to travel to a remote location and endure long, cold nights, patiently guiding a telescope to collect precious photons of light. Now, a proliferation of online archives allows astronomers to make discoveries from the comfort of their own offices.