Heavens

Forensic science experts from North Carolina State University have just published a comprehensive overview of forensic research that can be used to identify child abuse and starvation.

"By pulling all of this information together in one place, we hope that we can save the lives of some children and find justice for others," says Dr. Ann Ross, a professor of anthropology at NC State and lead author of the paper. Ross is also co-editor of the book "The Juvenile Skeleton in Forensic Abuse Investigations."

Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine would have formed far from its current location in the Star Wars universe, a new University of Bristol study into its real world counterparts, observed by the Kepler space telescope, suggests.

A group of researchers focused on sustainable practices, geography and earth sciences found something unexpected during their work in Central America: the effects of drug trafficking are leaving deep scars on a sensitive landscape.

They call the phenomenon "narco-deforestation," and the result is every bit as dark as it sounds.

"Not only are societies being ripped apart, but forests are being ripped apart," said Erik Nielsen, assistant professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability at Northern Arizona University.

BYU business professor Peter Madsen has been researching NASA's safety climate ever since the Columbia shuttle broke apart upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003.

Specifically, Madsen has been studying and quantifying how the organization recognizes "near-misses"—events where failures were narrowly averted resulting in successful outcomes.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Add yet another threat to the list of problems facing the rapidly disappearing rainforests of Central America: drug trafficking.

In an article in the journal Science, seven researchers who have done work in Central America point to growing evidence that drug trafficking threatens forests in remote areas of Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and nearby countries.

SPOKANE, Wash. –The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) today released the findings of a field study conducted by the Washington State University (WSU) Sleep and Performance Research Center. The study provides evidence that a revised provision in new hours-of-service regulations for truck drivers is more effective at combatting fatigue than the previous version. The new trucking regulations took effect last July.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite that observed the tropical low pressure area designated as System 91S earlier this week captured another look at a much weaker storm on January 30. Wind shear has now increased in the region, and the development chances for the tropical low pressure area have dropped.

At 800 UTC/3 a.m. EST, the center of System 91S was located near 18.2 south latitude and 39.1 east longitude, about 370 nautical miles northeast of Maputo, Mozambique (which is in the southernmost part of the country).

BERKELEY, Calif. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center recently accepted "Edison," a new flagship supercomputer designed for scientific productivity. Named in honor of American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, the Cray XC30 will be dedicated in a ceremony held at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on Feb. 5, and scientists are already reporting results.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Dylan and captured both visible and infrared imagery of the storm as it began landfalling. The visible image showed the extent of the storm, while the infrared data looked at the temperature of cloud tops to determine strong storms were already affecting the coast. The southwestern side of the storm had already started to make landfall in Queensland.

As computers enter ever more areas of our daily lives, the amount of data they produce has grown enormously.

But for this "big data" to be useful it must first be analyzed, meaning it needs to be stored in such a way that it can be accessed quickly when required.

Previously, any data that needed to be accessed in a hurry would be stored in a computer's main memory, or dynamic random access memory (DRAM) — but the size of the datasets now being produced makes this impossible.

Our solar system seems like a neat and orderly place, with small, rocky worlds near the Sun and big, gaseous worlds farther out, all eight planets following orbital paths unchanged since they formed.

However, the true history of the solar system is more riotous. Giant planets migrated in and out, tossing interplanetary flotsam and jetsam far and wide. New clues to this tumultuous past come from the asteroid belt.

ESO's Very Large Telescope has been used to create the first ever map of the weather on the surface of the nearest brown dwarf to Earth. An international team has made a chart of the dark and light features on WISE J104915.57-531906.1B, which is informally known as Luhman 16B and is one of two recently discovered brown dwarfs forming a pair only six light-years from the Sun. The new results are being published in the 30 January 2014 issue of the journal Nature.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- To get an idea of how the early solar system may have formed, scientists often look to asteroids. These relics of rock and dust represent what today's planets may have been before they differentiated into bodies of core, mantle, and crust.

On January 29 at 1430 UTC/9:30 a.m. EST, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center dropped System 91S from formation alert status, but the low pressure area still has a medium chance for development in the next 24 hours. System 91S was located near 18.2 south and 39.1 east, about 585 nautical miles northeast of Maputo, Mozambique. An image from India's Oceansat satellite indicated 20 to 25 knot (37.0 to 46.3 kph/23.0 to 28.7 mph winds over the eastern semi-circle of the storm.

The NASA-NOAA Satellite known as Suomi NPP flew over newborn Tropical Cyclone 11P in the Coral Sea and captured a visible image of the newly developed storm as it moves toward a landfall in Queensland, Australia. Tropical Cyclone 11P developed from the low pressure area previously known as System 99P.

The VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP captured an image of 11P on January 28 at 04:19 UTC/Jan. 27 at 11:19 p.m. EST. The image showed a more rounded circulation than the previous day, and bands of thunderstorms over the storm's southern semi-circle.