Heavens

Fewer high school students across the U.S. started drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, committing crimes and engaging in violence before graduation when their towns used the Communities That Care prevention system during the teens' middle school years.

A University of Washington study found that the positive influence of this community-led system was sustained through high school.

Tropical Cyclone Madi is headed for a landfall in southeastern India, and NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's TRMM satellite found that rainfall was heaviest north of the storm's center.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as TRMM captured data on Tropical Cyclone Madi's rainfall on Dec. 8 at 1144 UTC/6:44 a.m. EST. TRMM saw the bulk of the storm's rainfall was occurring north of the center of circulation and falling at a rate of 1 inch/30 mm per hour with isolated areas of 2 inches/50 mm.

Millions of people across the world live or depend on deltas for their livelihoods.

Formed at the lowest part of a river where its water flow slows and spreads into the sea, deltas are sediment-rich, biodiverse areas, a valuable source of seafood, fertile ground for agriculture, and host to ports important for transportation.

Using the new, high-frequency capabilities of the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomers have captured never-before-seen details of the nearby starburst galaxy M82. These new data highlight streamers of material fleeing the disk of the galaxy as well as concentrations of dense molecular gas surrounding pockets of intense star formation.

A massive ejection of material from the sun initially traveling at over 7 million miles per hour that narrowly missed Earth last year is an event solar scientists hope will open the eyes of policymakers regarding the impacts and mitigation of severe space weather, says a University of Colorado Boulder professor.

Scientists have found evidence that there was once an ancient lake on Mars that may have been able to support life, in research published today in the journal Science.

The region located between the surface of the sun and its atmosphere has been revealed as a more violent place than previously understood, according to images and data from NASA's newest solar observatory, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS.

The low pressure area known as "System 90L" in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean is no longer suspect for tropical or subtropical development. On Sunday, December 8, System 90L's showers had diminished. The low was non-tropical and was located about 100 mile south of the central Azores Islands. Since then, upper-level winds have become hostile and the low pressure area has no chance of becoming tropical or subtropical. On December 8, NOAA's GOES East satellite captured a visible image of the low pressure area and at that time the circulation was even difficult to identify.

Since the beginning of the financial crises that erupted in 2008, numerous governments have injected public funds into the banking system in order to prevent the failure of some entities and avoid the collective collapse of the system itself. Furthermore, to strengthen the robustness of the banking system, central banks increase the reserve capital requirements, that is, the percentage of money that banks must hold, and not loan out.

Rainfall data from the TRMM satellite was compiled and analyzed for tropical cyclones affecting the Philippines in 2013 and made into a movie. Satellite data showed that almost four feet of rain fell in parts of the northern and central Philippines.

ST. LOUIS -- Psychiatric nurses offer a missing and critical point of view in treating adolescents in foster care who have mental health issues, an instructor at Saint Louis University School of Nursing found.

"Adding a mental health nurse to the treatment team would be ideal. He or she could bring a much-needed medical perspective to caring for teens in foster care who have psychiatric disorders. Child welfare workers and social workers don't have the specific training they need to track health problems," said Julie Bertram, MSN, who also is lead author of the article.

NASA's Aqua satellite provided visible and infrared satellite imagery to forecasters helping confirm the birth of the sixth tropical cyclone of the Northern Indian Ocean cyclone season.

NASA's infrared instrument called AIRS that flies aboard the Aqua satellite gave scientists another look at the clouds and convection happening in a non-tropical low pressure area that's struggling to organize into a sub-tropical or tropical cyclone.

Until recently, Etienne Benson, an assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History and Sociology of Science, has trained his academic eye on the history of conservation of large, charismatic wildlife, such as tigers, grizzly bears and orcas.

With his latest publication, however, he consciously chose to investigate a creature that may be considered less exotic, and is certainly smaller.

Office buildings have an enormous carbon footprint, but often energy is being wasted maintaining empty rooms and spaces at a comfortable temperature. Research to be published in the International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems shows how the ubiquity of smart phones connected to the office network could be used to monitor occupancy and reduce heating or air conditioning for unused spaces.