Heavens

NASA's TRMM satellite observed Typhoon Lekima's shrinking eye on Oct. 24, and by the Oct. 25, the eye had shrunk to just 4 nautical miles. TRMM also observed very heavy rainfall occurring around the eyewall of the storm.

Cold air, mid-latitude westerly winds and wind shear are taking a toll on Tropical Storm Francisco and transitioning the storm into a cold core low pressure area. NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Francisco as it spread a blanket of clouds and showers over Japan on Oct. 25.

South-central Mexico was inundated with heavy rains from Hurricane Raymond during the week of Oct. 20, and Raymond has finally weakened to a tropical storm and is moving away from the coast. Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite showed that the heaviest rainfall in the weaker storm was now away from the Mexican coast.

Satellite imagery on Oct. 25 showed a cold front approaching the remnants of Tropical Storm Lorenzo in the central Atlantic Ocean.

A visible image captured by NOAA's GOES-East satellite image showed the oval-shaped remnants of Tropical Storm Lorenzo east of a frontal system in the central Atlantic Ocean. The image was created by NASA's GOES Project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Hot spots of mercury pollution in aquatic sediments and soils can contaminate local food webs and threaten ecosystems, but cleaning them up can be expensive and destructive. Researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and University of Maryland, Baltimore County have found a new low-cost, nonhazardous way to reduce the risk of exposure: using charcoal to trap it in the soil.

Cosmochemists have solved a long standing mystery in the formation of the solar system: Oxygen, the most abundant element in Earth's crust, follows a strange, anomalous pattern in the oldest, most pristine rocks, one that must result from a different chemical process than the well-understood reactions that form minerals containing oxygen on Earth.

AMHERST, Mass. – Sharp observation by doctoral student Mengmeng Cui in Thomas Russell's polymer science and engineering laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently led her to discover how to kinetically trap and control one liquid within another, locking and separating them in a stable system over long periods, with the ability to tailor and manipulate the shapes and flow characteristics of each.

Super-typhoon Lekima is poised to "make the curve" in the northwestern Pacific Ocean today. The storm's track is expected to shift from a northwesterly direction, and curve to northeasterly direction because it has started encountering mid-latitude westerly winds and a trough. NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Lekima just before it began its directional shift.

Radar reflectivity data from TRMM's PR instrument were used to create 3-D images that showed differences between super typhoon Lekima and tropical storm Francisco. TRMM is managed by both NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

On Oct. 24 at 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT, Francisco's maximum sustained winds were near 60 knots/69 mph/111 kph. Francisco was centered near 26.9 north and 130.8 east, about 134 nautical miles east of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan. Francisco was moving to the northeast at 7 knots/8 mph/12.9 kph and away from the island.

The world may be increasingly uncivil, and the workplace is no exception. With the rise of smartphones, you've probably even been a perpetrator of bad behavior yourself, checking text messages or taking a call during a meeting or business lunch.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — By tuning gold nanoparticles to just the right size, researchers from Brown University have developed a catalyst that selectively converts carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO), an active carbon molecule that can be used to make alternative fuels and commodity chemicals.

At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe – colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural background temperature of space.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have taken a new look at this intriguing object to learn more about its frigid properties and to determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance.

HOUSTON -- ( Oct. 24, 2013 ) -- Just 13 days in space may be enough to cause profound changes in eye structure and gene expression, report researchers from Houston Methodist, NASA Johnson Space Center, and two other institutions in the October 2013 issue of Gravitational and Space Research.

The study, which looked at how low gravity and radiation and oxidative damage impacts mice, is the first to examine eye-related gene expression and cell behavior after spaceflight.

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare that peaked at 8:30 pm EDT on Oct. 23, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. Such radiation can disrupt radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.

Powerful hurricane Raymond, located off Mexico's south-central Pacific coast, weakened to a tropical storm and has dropped a lot of rain over central western Mexico's coast. NASA's TRMM satellite measured rainfall from space and that data was used to create a rainfall total map.

Raymond has now started to move slowly away from the location where it has been parked since Monday October 21, 2013. Raymond dropped abundant rainfall in much of the same area already hit by deadly flooding and landslides with Hurricane Manuel in September.