Heavens

Stink bugs have been consistently ranked among the most damaging insect pests of cotton in the southeastern United States for the past several years. Apart from the feeding damage, stink bugs are capable of transmitting cotton seed and boll-rotting bacteria such as Pantoea agglomerans.

In order to find out whether cultural practices could be used to manage stink bugs -- such as adjusting the date of planting to mitigate peak pest pressure -- researchers from the University of Georgia compared cotton plots that were planted in May to other plots that were planted in June.

NEW YORK, NY (March 18, 2014) — Vitamin D deficiency has been implicated in numerous health conditions in recent years, including depressed mood and major depressive disorder. Recent observational studies provide some support for an association of vitamin D levels with depression, but the data do not indicate whether vitamin D deficiency causes depression or vice versa. These studies also do not examine whether vitamin D supplementation improves depression.

Scientists, using cameras aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), have created the largest high resolution mosaic of our moon's north polar region. The six-and-a-half feet (two-meters)-per-pixel images cover an area equal to more than one-quarter of the United States.

Web viewers can zoom in and out, and pan around an area. Constructed from 10,581 pictures, the mosaic provides enough detail to see textures and subtle shading of the lunar terrain. Consistent lighting throughout the images makes it easy to compare different regions.

Earth dodged a huge magnetic bullet from the sun on July 23, 2012.

According to University of California, Berkeley, and Chinese researchers, a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections – the most intense eruptions on the sun – sent a pulse of magnetized plasma barreling into space and through Earth's orbit. Had the eruption come nine days earlier, it would have hit Earth, potentially wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, disabling satellites and GPS, and disrupting our increasingly electronic lives.

DURHAM, NH –– In a paper published today in Nature Communications, an international team of scientists, including three from the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center, uncovers the origin and cause of an extreme space weather event that occurred on July 22, 2012 at the sun and generated the fastest solar wind speed ever recorded directly by a solar wind instrument.

Agricultural fires continue to burn in the Indochina region as evidenced by this Aqua image taken on March 18, 2014. This natural-color image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, aboard the Aqua satellite. More fires have been set in both Burma and Laos since the last image taken by MODIS on March 07. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red. Fire is used in cropland areas for pest and weed control and to prepare fields for planting.

NASA's TRMM satellite passed over the remnants of Tropical Cyclone Gillian and spotted some towering thunderstorms and areas of heavy rainfall, indicating there's still power in the former tropical storm.

It takes only a fraction of a second to hit the retweet button on Twitter. But if thousands of people all retweet at once, a piece of information 140 characters long can go viral almost instantly in today's Internet landscape.

If that information is incorrect, especially in a crisis, it's hard for the social media community to gain control and push out accurate information, new research shows.

WASHINGTON D.C., March 18, 2014 -- A powerful, new three-dimensional model provides fresh insight into the turbulent death throes of supernovas, whose final explosions outshine entire galaxies and populate the universe with elements that make life on Earth possible.

The frustrated attempts of a UCLA graduate student to quantify the amount of water draining from Greenland's melting ice sheet led him to devise a new way to measure river flows from outer space, he and his professor report in a new study.

The new approach relies exclusively on the measurements of a river's width over time, which can be obtained from freely available satellite imagery.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Gillian's remnants in the southern Arafura Sea today, as it passes north of Australia's "Top End."

During the week of March 10, Tropical Cyclone Gillian formed in the northern Gulf of Carpentaria and made a brief landfall on the Western Cape York Peninsula, weakening to a remnant low. After re-emerging in the Gulf, Gillian became a tropical storm again and by March 17 had again weakened to a remnant low as it exited the Gulf and moved into the Arafura Sea.

Researchers with the National Science Foundation-funded BICEP2 Collaboration today announced that their telescope in Antarctica has allowed them to collect what they believe is the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation.

Inflation is the cataclysmic event in which, in a fleeting fraction of a second following the Big Bang, the infant universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of the best telescopes.

Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. All this, of course, was just theory.

In many industrialized countries, city skylines are dominated by imposing glass façades and skyscrapers made of concrete and steel. There is a drawback to these magnificent structures, though – they often get very hot in the summer, so they mostly need elaborate and costly air conditioning systems. And these already account for some 14 percent of Germany's annual energy consumption. Experts reckon that total cooling requirements in buildings will triple by 2020.

Cooling and heating using metal organic frameworks

To celebrate its 24th year in orbit, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has released a beautiful new image of part of NGC 2174, also known as the Monkey Head Nebula. This colourful region is filled with young stars embedded within bright wisps of cosmic gas and dust.