Heavens

Tropical Cyclone made landfall near Darwin, Australia on November 24 as a weak tropical storm as NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead and measured its rainfall.

Composite materials are of increasing interest to physicists. Typically, they are made of electrically conducting elements - such as spherical metallic or elongated carbon particles - embedded in an insulating glass or a polymer matrix. Their controllable electrical resistivity, combined with their light and flexible properties, makes them suited for applications in flexible electronics. Now, a theoretical model, confirmed experimentally, elucidates how electrical resistivity varies with the concentration of the particles in these composite materials.

Cyber threats are rapidly emerging as one of the primary security concerns for the nation and global community as targeted cyber attacks can cause severe consequences to critical infrastructure and sectors of the economy. Recent calls for action, including President Obama's Executive Orders 13636 and Presidential Policy Directive 21, have brought the concept of "resilience" in the face of cyber attacks to the forefront of the nation's consciousness. In a recent special issue of Springer's journal Environment Systems & Decisions, Dr.

Our Galaxy may have been swallowing "pills" — clouds of gas with a magnetic wrapper — to keep making stars for the past eight billion years.

That's the conclusion of CSIRO astronomer Dr Alex Hill, lead author of a study of the Smith Cloud, a large gas cloud falling into our Galaxy from intergalactic space.

"Clouds like this may provide the fuel for our Galaxy to make stars," Dr Hill said.

High-speed 'jets' spat out by black holes pack a lot of power because they contain heavy atoms, astronomers have found.

Black-hole jets recycle matter and energy into space and can affect when and where a galaxy forms stars.

"Jets from supermassive black holes help determine a galaxy's fate — how it evolves," said CSIRO's Dr Tasso Tzioumis, a member of the research team.

"So we want to understand better the impact jets have on their environment."

CINCINNATI— People with migraine who also battle allergies and hay fever (rhinitis) endure a more severe form of headaches than their peers who struggle with migraine, but aren't affected by the seasonal or year-round sniffles, according to researchers from the University of Cincinnati (UC), Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Vedanta Research.

Much like the Grand Canyon, Nanedi Valles snakes across the Martian surface suggesting that liquid water once crossed the landscape, according to a team of researchers who believe that molecular hydrogen made it warm enough for water to flow.

The presence of molecular hydrogen, in addition to carbon dioxide and water, could have created a greenhouse effect on Mars 3.8 billion years ago that pushed temperatures high enough to allow for liquid water, the researchers state in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 24, 2013 -- An old, hilarious if somewhat juvenile party trick involves covertly tapping the top of someone's newly opened beer bottle and then standing back as the suds foam out onto the floor.

For decades, astronomers have sought strong evidence that the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is producing a jet of high-energy particles. Based on new results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array radio telescope, they now have it.

Previous studies that used a variety of telescopes suggested there was a jet, but these reports, including the orientation of the suspected jets, often contradicted one another and were not considered definitive.

It began in the Oort cloud, almost a light year away. It has traveled for over a million years. It has almost reached the star that has pulled it steadily forward for so long. On Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 2013, Comet ISON will finally sling shot around the sun. Here its inward journey through the solar system will end -- either because it will break up due to intense heat and gravity of the sun, or because, still intact, it speeds back away, never to return.

The National Hurricane Center issued their final advisory on Extra-Tropical Storm Melissa as it spins toward to Azores Islands and weakens.

The low pressure area previously known as System 90S has continued organizing and consolidating and infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite helped confirm its strengthening into Cyclone Alessia in the Southern Indian Ocean. Alessia formed off of Western Australia's Kimberley coast and the first Cyclone Warnings and Watches of the season are now in effect.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Cyclone Helen as it was making landfall in eastern India on November 22.

The AIRS instrument, or Atmospheric Infrared Sounder that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite, captured infrared data on Helen on November 21 at 20:05 UTC/3:05 p.m. EST. At that time, Helen had just begun to make landfall and moderate rainfall from the storm's northwestern edge was over the coast. Helen's western cloud cover extended from Kolkata south to Chennai at the time.

In a dense fog, a Russian Rockot rocket on 22 November 2013 cleared the launchpad of the Baikonur Cosmodrome on schedule at 13:02:15 CET. In the tip of the rocket: three identical satellites to measure the Earth's magnetic field. A good hour and a half later, at 14:37:48 CET, the report of success: all three satellites separated seamlessly from the carrier rocket and the ground stations Kiruna (Sweden) and Longyearbyen /Svalbard (Norway) were able to establish radio contact with them.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole was the first to discover ultrahigh-energy neutrinos which most likely were the result of cosmic acceleration in outer space. "After more than a decade of intense searching, we can now announce that we have found neutrinos that were very probably generated in the vast expanses of outer space", reported Professor Lutz Köpke of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Neutrinos are electrically neutral particles with tiny mass.