Heavens

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Transparent displays have a variety of potential applications — such as the ability to see navigation or dashboard information while looking through the windshield of a car or plane, or to project video onto a window or a pair of eyeglasses. A number of technologies have been developed for such displays, but all have limitations.

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of eleven public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes. Together these are providing a vast legacy of publicly available data for the global astronomical community.

Until recently measuring a 27-dimensional quantum state would have been a time-consuming, multistage process using a technique called quantum tomography, which is similar to creating a 3D image from many 2D ones. Researchers at the University of Rochester have been able to apply a recently developed, alternative method called direct measurement to do this in a single experiment with no post-processing.

Renewable tidal energy sufficient to power about half of Scotland could be harnessed from a single stretch of water off the north coast of the country, engineers say.

Researchers have completed the most detailed study yet of how much tidal power could be generated by turbines placed in the Pentland Firth, between mainland Scotland and Orkney, and estimate 1.9 gigawatts (GW) could be available.

The in-depth assessment by engineers at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh offers valuable insights into how to develop and regulate this clean energy resource effectively.

A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way's disc – the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that give our Galaxy its 'flying saucer' shape.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- A new approach to harvesting solar energy, developed by MIT researchers, could improve efficiency by using sunlight to heat a high-temperature material whose infrared radiation would then be collected by a conventional photovoltaic cell. This technique could also make it easier to store the energy for later use, the researchers say.

Astronomers have discovered a distant quasar illuminating a vast nebula of diffuse gas, revealing for the first time part of the network of filaments thought to connect galaxies in a cosmic web. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led the study, published January 19 in Nature.

Using the 10-meter Keck I Telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers detected a very large, luminous nebula of gas extending about 2 million light-years across intergalactic space.

People in the southern Philippines are used to heavy rainfall this time of the year but rainfall totals have recently been exceptionally high. A tropical low known as System 91W, located northeast of Mindanao has been an almost permanent feature on weather maps for the past week. NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's TRMM satellite has provided data on rainfall and flooding that was used to create a map of the event.

NASA's Terra satellite saw the System 94S, a tropical low, still holding together as it continued moving inland from the Northern Territory into Western Australia today, January 17.

The tropical low pressure system known as System 94S took a more southern route than previously expected and moved into Western Australia today, January 17. System 94S is now expected to continue moving in a southerly direction according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology or ABM.

The tenth tropical cyclone of the Southern Pacific Ocean cyclone season was born today, January 17 as NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data on the storm as it became Tropical Storm June.

A wildfire started and spread quickly in the foothills northeast of Los Angeles on January 16, 2014. The plume of ash and smoke blanketed much of the metropolitan area and prompted air quality warnings.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites captured these images of the Colby fire just before (top) and just after noon on January 16. The morning image is clearer because the scene was centered under the satellite, while the afternoon image is fuzzy because the satellite was observing from an angle.

The tropical depression southwest of Madagascar on January 16 developed into a tropical cyclone early on January 17 as NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and captured its birth.

When Aqua passed over newborn Tropical Cyclone Deliwe on January 17 at 10:55 UTC/5:55 a.m. EST the MODIS instrument or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer took a picture of it. Deliwe was previously known as Tropical Depression 09S. In the MODIS image bands of thunderstorms stretched west into the Mozambique Channel and south into the Southern Indian Ocean.

The discovery of what is essentially a 3D version of graphene – the 2D sheets of carbon through which electrons race at many times the speed at which they move through silicon - promises exciting new things to come for the high-tech industry, including much faster transistors and far more compact hard drives. A collaboration of researchers at the U.S Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has discovered that sodium bismuthate can exist as a form of quantum matter called a three-dimensional topological Dirac semi-metal (3DTDS).

PROVIDENCE, R.I. –As Medicaid eligibility expands under the Affordable Care Act, prison systems are increasingly supporting prisoners' enrollment in Medicaid as a way to help lower prison system costs and improve prisoners' access to health care upon release. These are the findings of a nationwide survey of state prison administrators that was led by Josiah D. Rich, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, based at The Miriam Hospital. The study is published online in advance of print in the American Journal of Public Health.

The discovery of what is essentially a 3D version of graphene – the 2D sheets of carbon through which electrons race at many times the speed at which they move through silicon - promises exciting new things to come for the high-tech industry, including much faster transistors and far more compact hard drives. A collaboration of researchers at the U.S Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has discovered that sodium bismuthate can exist as a form of quantum matter called a three-dimensional topological Dirac semi-metal (3DTDS).