Heavens

NASA's TRMM satellite spotted heavy rainfall and very high cloud tops in strong thunderstorms in the southern quadrant of Tropical Cyclone Madi on December 11 as it neared southeastern India's coast.

One of the most powerful tools for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies has been the use of computer simulations--numerical models of astrophysical processes run on supercomputers and compared with astronomical observations. Getting computer simulations to produce realistic-looking galaxies has been a challenge, however, and different codes (simulation programs) produce inconsistent results.

Imagine playing a video game like Call of Duty or Battlefield and having the ability to lead your virtual army unit while moving freely throughout your house.

Gaming could become this realistic, thanks to new technology developed by Dina Katabi's research group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) that allows for highly accurate, 3-D motion tracking. The new system, dubbed "WiTrack", uses radio signals to track a person through walls and obstructions, pinpointing her 3-D location to within 10 to 20 centimeters — about the width of an adult hand.

Long online transactions can take a toll on a person's self-control, but adding more self-expression and personal identity to those processes can help restore control, according to Penn State researchers.

"Making a lot of choices leads to what researchers call ego-depletion and that can affect self-control," said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. "When a person makes a lot of choices, the ability to exert self-control begins to diminish with every choice."

"By causing the air to be stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space, you get the absolute lowest temperatures we're able to find," Scambos said. "We suspected that we would be looking for one magical site that got extremely cold, but what we found was a large strip of Antarctica at high altitude that regularly reached these record low temperatures."

When NASA's Juno spacecraft flew past Earth early in October 2013, recording a first-of-a-kind movie of the approach was a special assignment for an onboard camera system known as a star tracker.

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Bonefish, also called gray ghosts, are among the most elusive and highly prized fishes sought by recreational anglers in the Florida Keys, Bahamas and similar tropical habitats around the world. Bonefish support a fishery worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, but this fishery is threatened in many areas by habitat loss and degradation, and by overfishing. Scientists are scrambling to identify and protect critical habitats and identify other ways to conserve this vital fishery.

When soup is heated, it starts to boil. When time and space are heated, an expanding universe can emerge, without requiring anything like a "Big Bang". This phase transition between a boring empty space and an expanding universe containing mass has now been mathematically described by a research team at the Vienna University of Technology, together with colleagues from Harvard, the MIT and Edinburgh. The idea behind this result is a remarkable connection between quantum field theory and Einstein's theory of relativity.

A Cookbook for Spacetime

A long-standing difficulty with supercomputer simulations of the formation and evolution of galaxies has been getting consistent results among different codes (programs) and with actual observations, so that computationally simulated galaxies look like real galaxies. While such conflicts could be evidence of complex physics in invisible dark matter, emerging evidence suggests that inconsistencies may originate from a poor understanding of processes involving ordinary matter as well as limitations in computational capability and differences in computer codes.

Tropical Cyclone Madi has maintained its tropical storm-force strength over 24 hours as it neared the coast of east central India on December 10. NASA's Aqua satellite flew overhead and provided a clear picture of the storm's proximity to the coast.

SAN FRANCISCO—Scientists recently recorded the lowest temperatures on Earth at a desolate and remote ice plateau in East Antarctica, trumping a record set in 1983 and uncovering a new puzzle about the ice-covered continent.

An atmospheric peculiarity the Earth shares with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is likely common to billions of planets, University of Washington astronomers have found, and knowing that may help in the search for potentially habitable worlds.

First, some history: It's known that air grows colder and thinner with altitude, but in 1902 a scientist named Léon Teisserenc de Bort, using instrument-equipped balloons, found a point in Earth's atmosphere at about 40,000 to 50,000 feet where the air stops cooling and begins growing warmer.

The study identifies five healthy behaviours as being integral to having the best chance of leading a disease-free lifestyle: taking regular exercise, non-smoking, a low bodyweight, a healthy diet and a low alcohol intake.

The people who consistently followed four or five of these behaviours experienced a 60 per cent decline in dementia and cognitive decline - with exercise being the strongest mitigating factor – as well as 70 per cent fewer instances of diabetes, heart disease and stroke, compared with people who followed none.

In the first 300 days of the Mars Science Laboratory's surface mission, the Curiosity rover cruised around the planet's Gale Crater, collecting soil samples and investigating rock structures while the onboard Radiation Assessment Detector made detailed measurements of the radiation environment on the surface of Mars.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University and the University of Hawaii have found some mineralogical surprises in the Moon's largest impact crater.