Heavens

Astronomers at the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy's disk, which contains our stars, planets, gas, and dust. This new knowledge sheds light on how individual atoms have assembled into stars, planets, and galaxies like our own, and what the future holds for these galaxies.

Tropical Depression 05W developed on July 25, 2016 as NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and captured temperature data on the storm as it came together.

RapidScat is an instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station and measures winds over an ocean surface. RapidScat provided a look at the winds around Tropical Storm Frank in the Eastern Pacific and saw strongest winds south of the center.

On July 24, RapidScat showed that RapidScat measured wind speeds near 29 meters per second (65 mph/104.6 kph) south and east of the center. RapidScat showed that winds around the rest of the storm were about 18 meters per second (40 mph/64 kph).

A team of researchers at Tohoku University has discovered that the Mg-Sc alloy shows shape memory properties. This finding raises the potential for development and application of lightweight SMAs across a number of industries, including the aerospace industry.

Shape memory alloys (SMAs) show distinctive behaviours such as shape recovery upon heating and have a superelastic effect. They have been used in various industrial fields such as consumer electronics, housing facilities, personal ornaments, anti-seismic engineering and medical equipment.

A new species of extinct flesh-eating marsupial that terrorised Australia's drying forests about 5 million years ago has been identified from a fossil discovered in remote northwestern Queensland.

The hypercarnivore, which is thought to have weighed about 20 to 25 kilograms, is a distant and much bigger cousin of Australia's largest living, flesh-eating marsupial, the Tasmanian Devil, which weighs in at about 10 kilogram.

3-D movies immerse us in new worlds and allow us to see places and things that we otherwise couldn't. But behind every 3-D experience is something that is uniformly despised: those goofy glasses.

In a new paper, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have demonstrated a display that lets you watch 3-D films in a movie theater without extra eyewear.

Dubbed "Cinema 3D", the prototype uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any seat in a theater.

On July 22, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite and NASA's RapidScat instrument gathered data on Tropical Storm Darby as it neared Hawaii and triggered warnings.

A Tropical Storm warning was in effect for Hawaii County and a Tropical Storm watch was in effect for Maui County, including the islands of Maui, Molokai, Lanai and Kahoolawe

Physicists from MIPT and the Russian Quantum Center have developed a method which is going to make it easier to create a universal quantum computer -- they have discovered a way of using multilevel quantum systems (qudits), each one of which is able to work with multiple "conventional" quantum elements -- qubits.

Scientists at Hokkaido University have revealed temperature-dependent energy-state conversion of molecular hydrogen on ice surfaces, suggesting the need for a reconsideration of molecular evolution theory.

Molecular hydrogen, the most abundant element in space, is created when two hydrogen atoms bond on minute floating ice particles. It has two energy states: ortho and para, depending on the direction of proton spins. Ortho-hydrogen converts to para-hydrogen on extremely low temperature ice particles, though its mechanism remained unclear.

Instead of taking decades to recover, tropical forests are at risk of taking hundreds of years to re-grow because of lianas, which spread rapidly following extensive tree-felling.

In a new study published in the African Journal of Ecology, scientists advocate the temporary removal of lianas in selected areas to help tropical forests grow back.

The team, from the University of York and Flamingo Land zoo, reveal for the first time outside of commercial forestry or plantation studies, how lianas are preventing the growth of trees in an African forest.

As tropical storm Frank was forming in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, NASA analyzed rainfall and cloud heights and found "hot towers" that indicated intensification was likely.

The University of Nottingham and Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (RNoNA) are investigating how to prevent shipping Global Positioning Signals (GPS) being jammed in potential cyberattacks that may cause vessels to go off course and collide or run aground.

Big, modern ships are highly automated with networked navigational systems, including differential GPS (DGPS) which offers more accurate positioning (to one metre) than conventional GPS.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the TV series "Star Trek" has captured the public's imagination with the signature phrase, "To boldly go where no one has gone before." NASA's Hubble Space Telescope doesn't "boldly go" deep into space, but it is "boldly peering" deeper into the universe than ever before to explore the warping of space and time and uncover some of the farthest objects ever seen.

LAWRENCE -- In the second it takes to read these words, 65 billion neutrinos will shoot through every square centimeter of your body. Luckily, these infinitesimal particles don't do any harm -- they pass through us, as they do with most everything, without stopping or interacting.

Infrared data NASA's Aqua satellite showed that the strongest storms within Tropical Storm Darby were occurring north of the center when it passed overhead.

On July 21, 2016 at 1125 UTC (7:25 a.m. EST) the MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite saw coldest cloud top temperatures between minus 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit/ minus 51.2 to minus 56.6 degrees Celsius indicating strong storms remained north of Darby's center. Storms with cloud tops that cold and high in the troposphere have been shown to generate heavy rainfall.