Heavens

Two worlds orbiting a distant star are about to become a snack of cosmic proportions. Astronomers announced today that the planets Kepler-56b and Kepler-56c will be swallowed by their star in a short time by astronomical standards. Their ends will come in 130 million and 155 million years, respectively.

"As far as we know, this is the first time two known exoplanets in a single system have a predicted 'time of death,'" says lead author Gongjie Li of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that marijuana use is associated with impaired sleep quality.

(Washington, DC) – New research published in the June 2014 issue of Language presents evidence that the methods employed by the authors of articles published in prestigious international science journals are not supported by a more rigorous linguistic analysis. The Language article, "A statistical comparison of written language and non-linguistic symbol systems," was authored by Richard Sproat, a Research Scientist at Google, based on work he previously did at the Oregon Health & Science University.

A session at this year's Euroanaesthesia meeting will discuss how improving the skills of members of the public, including schoolchildren, in resuscitation following cardiac arrest could save up to 100,000 lives per year. The presentation will be given by Professor Bernd Böttiger, Director of Science and Research at the European Resuscitation Council (ERC), and also Head of the Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at University Hospital Cologne, Germany.

Laser beams 60,000 billion times more powerful than a laser pointer have been used to recreate scaled supernova explosions in the laboratory as a way of investigating one of the most energetic events in the Universe.

Supernova explosions, triggered when the fuel within a star reignites or its core collapses, launch a detonation shock wave that sweeps through a few light years of space from the exploding star in just a few hundred years. But not all such explosions are alike and some, such as Cassiopeia A, show puzzling irregular shapes made of knots and twists.

Exposing infants to a new vegetable early in life encourages them to eat more of it compared to offering novel vegetables to older children, new research from the University of Leeds suggests.

The researchers, led by Professor Marion Hetherington in the Institute of Psychological Sciences, also found that even fussy eaters are able to eat a bit more of a new vegetable each time they are offered it.

The new Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory satellite is now in the hands of the engineers who will fly the spacecraft and ensure the steady flow of data on rain and snow for the life of the mission. The official handover to the Earth Science Mission Operations team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on May 29, marked the end of a successful check-out period.

A coronal mass ejection, or CME, surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014, and NASA's newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail. This was the first CME observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, which launched in June 2013 to peer into the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere with better resolution than ever before. Watch the movie to see how a curtain of solar material erupts outward at speeds of 1.5 million miles per hour.

Will the new results immediately lead to better solar cells? "Such ultrafast spectroscopic studies, and in particular their comparison with advanced theoretical modelling, provide impressive and most direct insight in the fundamental phenomena that initiate the organic photovoltaic process. They turn out to be very similar to the strategies developed by Nature in photosynthesis.", says Lienau. "Recent studies indicate that quantum coherence apparently plays an important role in that case.

Researchers from the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, hosted at LSTM, conducted an independent review of the effects of pre-referral rectal artesunate for people with severe malaria, published in the Cochrane Library today. The review follows a large trial of rectal artesunate in 2009 which led the World Health Organization to recommend its use.

This year NOAA, in addition to managing all of the dropsondes during the HS3 mission, will enable the mission to fly another week to better study tropical cyclones. A dropsonde is a device that measures winds, temperature and humidity, dropped from an aircraft.

The NASA Global Hawks are unmanned aircraft that will be piloted remotely from the HS3 mission control at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Global Hawk aircraft are well-suited for hurricane investigations because they can fly for as long as 26 hours and fly above hurricanes at altitudes greater than 55,000 feet.

Installation of the SUVI and EXIS instruments moves the program another step closer to the launch of the GOES-R satellite in early 2016. In addition to SUVI and EXIS, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and the Space Environment In-Situ Suite (SEISS) were delivered for integration earlier this year and will be installed on the spacecraft in the coming months. The two remaining instruments that complete the GOES-R Series Program payload are the Magnetometer and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM). Both instruments are scheduled for delivery later this year.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — In the Friday (May 30) edition of the journal Science, researchers find that early childhood development programs are particularly important for disadvantaged children in Jamaica and can greatly impact an individual's ability to earn more money as an adult.

Four days later, Amanda quickly weakened as a result of dry air moving into the system and wind shear.

National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecaster Brennan noted at 5 a.m. EDT on May 29 in the NHC Discussion that "Amanda has come unglued during the past few hours, with the remaining deep convection now located more than 2 degrees to the northeast of the low-level center. This weakening appears to be due to the usually potent combination of vertical wind shear and mid/upper-level dry air advecting (moving) over the cyclone."

Scientists combined observations from two NASA missions to check out the moon's lopsided shape and how it changes under Earth's sway – a response not seen from orbit before.

The team drew on studies by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been investigating the moon since 2009, and by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, mission. Because orbiting spacecraft gathered the data, the scientists were able to take the entire moon into account, not just the side that can be observed from Earth.