Heavens

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), Olivier Chesneau (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Nice, France) and an international team of collaborators have found that the yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A [1] is absolutely huge — 1300 times the diameter of the Sun and much bigger than was expected [2]. This makes it the largest yellow star known.

NASA's Aqua and TRMM satellites have been providing rainfall data, cloud heights and temperature and other valuable information to forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center as they track Tropical Cyclones Hadi and Lusi in the South Pacific.

Pasadena, CA— Some galaxies grew up in a hurry. Most of the galaxies that have been observed from the early days of the universe were young and actively forming stars. Now, an international team of astronomers, including Carnegie's Eric Persson and Andy Monson, have discovered galaxies that were already mature and massive in the early days. Fifteen mature galaxies were found at a record-breaking average distance of 12 billion light years, when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old.

PITTSBURGH—Too much garlic mustard in your neighborhood forest? Actually, the problem may be too many deer.

A research team led by Susan Kalisz, professor of evolutionary ecology in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Biological Sciences, published a paper online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that takes a long view on why invasive garlic mustard plants thrive to the detriment of native species.

The JTWC noted that animated infrared imagery showed that the convection over the weak low-level circulation was poorly organized. Radar imagery showed that bands of thunderstorms were fragmented over the northwestern quadrant of the low pressure area.

McCall says twelve of the fourteen giants in the Local Sheet, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, are "spiral galaxies" which have highly flattened disks in which stars are forming. The remaining two are more puffy "elliptical galaxies", whose stellar bulks were laid down long ago. Intriguingly, the two ellipticals sit on opposite sides of the Council. Winds expelled in the earliest phases of their development might have shepherded gas towards the Local Group, thereby helping to build the disks of the Milky Way and Andromeda.

Research using NASA data is giving new insight into one of the processes causing Greenland's ice sheet to lose mass. A team of scientists used satellite observations and ice thickness measurements gathered by NASA's Operation IceBridge to calculate the rate at which ice flows through Greenland's glaciers into the ocean. The findings of this research give a clearer picture of how glacier flow affects the Greenland Ice Sheet and shows that this dynamic process is dominated by a small number of glaciers.

Tropical Cyclone Lusi has spawned warnings and watches in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Zealand as it moves through the South Pacific Ocean. NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites provided visible and infrared views of the storm that revealed it has become better organized.

NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Lusi over Vanuatu on March 9 at 23:30 UTC. The image showed towering thunderstorms surrounded the center and northwestern quadrants of the storm.

As towns across Cape Cod struggle with problems stemming from septic systems, a recent study by a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientist focuses on one specific toxic by-product: mercury. In a study of local groundwater, biogeochemist Carl Lamborg found microbial action on wastewater transforms it into more mobile, more toxic forms of the element.

His findings were published in Environmental Science and Technology in November 2013.

The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds. Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby.

On Friday, March 7 there were two tropical lows located east and west of Queensland, Australia. Those lows organized and intensified into Tropical Cyclone Gillian and Hadi and were caught together in one amazing image from NASA's Aqua satellite. While Gillian has already made one landfall and is expected to make another, Hadi is turning tail and running from the mainland.

Smartphones are capable of giving us directions when we're lost, sending photos and videos to our friends in mere seconds, and even helping us find the best burger joint in a three-mile radius. But University of Houston researchers are using smartphones for another very important function: diagnosing diseases in real time.

The researchers are developing a disease diagnostic system that offers results that could be read using only a smartphone and a $20 lens attachment.

Australian astronomers have shown galaxies in the vast empty regions of the Universe are actually aligned into delicate strings in research published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A team of astronomers based at The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has found short strings of faint galaxies in what were previously thought to be extremely empty parts of space.

Potentially devastating plant pests and diseases are highlighted in a new report from EASAC, the European Academies' Science Advisory Council, the leading provider of independent scientific advice to Europe's policy-makers. In the detailed EU-wide study of emerging plant pests and diseases, EASAC describes their combined threat to crops and forests and wider ecosystems, with implications for human health. In economic terms, as admitted by the EU Commission, billions of euros could be at stake and the environmental impact may be irreversible. Prof.

Obesity levels among women in low- and middle-income countries tend to rise in line with wealth as they purchase more energy-dense foods, but a new UCL study suggests that more educated consumers make better food choices that mitigate this effect.

The study showed that in middle-income countries, obesity levels among women with secondary or higher education are 14-19% lower than less-educated women of similar wealth.