Heavens

Young stars are often surrounded by dense, rotating discs of gas and dust, known as protoplanetary discs, from which planets are born. The heat from a typical young solar-type star means that the water within a protoplanetary disc is gaseous up to distances of around 3 au from the star [1] -- less than 3 times the average distance between the Earth and the Sun -- or around 450 million kilometres [2]. Further out, due to the extremely low pressure, the water molecules transition directly from a gaseous state to form a patina of ice on dust grains and other particles.

Tropical Cyclone Celia continued to generate heavy rains as it moved through the Eastern Pacific Ocean. NASA's RapidScat analyzed surface wind speeds while the GPM core satellite measured rainfall rates occurring within the storm.

Tropical Storm Darby has been increasing in intensity since yesterday and is expected to become a hurricane. NASA provided a visible look at the structure of the storm and peered through it to determine surface wind speed.

On July 12 at 21:45 UTC (5:45 p.m. EDT) the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA-DOD's Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible light image of Hurricane Celia and Tropical Storm Darby in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Celia is located to the northwest of Darby. As of today, July 13, Celia has weakened to a tropical storm.

A researcher at The University of Texas at Arlington has created a new method that uses big data analytics and text-mining techniques to improve market intelligence and explain potential mergers and acquisitions of startup companies in the fast-moving high-technology industry.

Rising income inequality, and the resulting scarcity of certain types of jobs, is a key reason young Americans are having babies before getting married.

Astronomers from KU Leuven, Belgium, have shown that the interaction between the surface and the atmosphere of an exoplanet has major consequences for the temperature on the planet. This temperature, in turn, is a crucial element in the quest for habitable planets outside our Solar System.

Shorebirds breeding in Alaska are being exposed to mercury at levels that could put their populations at risk, according to new research from The Condor: Ornithological Applications.

AMHERST, Mass. - University of Massachusetts Amherst computer science graduate students Kyle Wray and Luis Pineda, with their professor Shlomo Zilberstein, today described a new approach to managing the challenge of transferring control between a human and an autonomous system, in a paper they presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in New York City.

A lightweight telescope that a team of NASA scientists and engineers is developing specifically for CubeSat scientific investigations could become the first to carry a mirror made of carbon nanotubes in an epoxy resin.

Led by Theodor Kostiuk, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the technology-development effort is aimed at giving the scientific community a compact, reproducible, and relatively inexpensive telescope that would fit easily inside a CubeSat. Individual CubeSats measure four inches on a side.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - More seniors are getting help from family, friends and hired helpers to keep them in their homes, despite disabilities that keep them from total independence, a new study finds.

But that increase isn't happening evenly across all groups. And the rising demand may have implications for the lives and careers of caregivers, and for policies that aim to support at-home caregivers.

Habitual cycling, whether as transportation to work or as a recreational activity, is associated with lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D), according to a study published this week in PLOS Medicine. This cohort study, conducted by Martin Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark, and colleagues, included 24,623 men and 27,890 women from Denmark, recruited between the ages of 50 and 65, and compared the association between self-reported recreational and commuter cycling habits with T2D incidence measured in the Danish National Diabetes Registry.

Neutrinos are elementary particles known for displaying weak interactions. As a result, neutrinos passing each other in the same place hardly notice one another. Yet, neutrinos inside a supernova collectively behave differently because of their extremely high density. A new study reveals that neutrinos produced in the core of a supernova are highly localised compared to neutrinos from all other known sources. This result stems from a fresh estimate for an entity characterising these neutrinos, known as wave packets, which provide information on both their position and their momentum.

Nepartak was a powerful category four tropical typhoon when it hit Taiwan last week but weakened to a tropical storm as it moved into the Taiwan Strait. NASA calculated the heavy rainfall the typhoon brought to Taiwan and China before it dissipated over southeastern China.

A team of small, shoebox-sized satellites, flying in formation around the Earth, could estimate the planet's reflected energy with twice the accuracy of traditional monolith satellites, according to an MIT-led study published online in Acta Astronautica. If done right, such satellite swarms could also be cheaper to build, launch, and maintain.

The Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Storm Darby as it was developing in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.