Heavens

From a fish-eye view, rice fields in California's Yolo Bypass providean all-you-can-eat bug buffet for juvenile salmon seeking nourishmenton their journey to the sea. That's according to a new reportdetailing the scientific findings of an experiment that planted fishin harvested rice fields earlier this year, resulting in the fattest,fastest-growing salmon on record in the state's rivers.

The heat is on, at least in the Arctic.

Average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic during the last 100 years are higher now than during any century in the past 44,000 years and perhaps as long ago as 120,000 years, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.

A remote acoustic detection system designed to identify homemade bombs can determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives.

That capability – never before reported in a remote bomb detection system – was described in a paper by Vanderbilt engineer Douglas Adams presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Dynamic Systems and Control Conference on Oct. 23 in Stanford, CA.

Despite a 7.2 percent national unemployment rate, the job market is a healthy one for college students majoring in information systems, with nearly three quarters of students receiving at least one job offer, according to the nationwide IS Job Index by the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and Temple University's Fox School of Business. The study compiled data from more than 1,200 students and from 48 universities across the United States.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — University of California, Riverside astronomers Bahram Mobasher and Naveen Reddy are members of a team that has discovered the most distant galaxy ever found. The galaxy is seen as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 5 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years.

COLLEGE STATION, Oct. 23, 2013 — Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin may be former football rivals, but the Lone Star State's two research giants have teamed up to detect the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy ever found — one created within 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The research is published in the most recent edition of the journal Nature.

Satellite data revealed that Raymond, formerly a hurricane, now a tropical storm is finally moving away from the coast of south-central Mexico.

NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Raymond over Mexico on Oct. 22 at 1:50 p.m. EDT when it was still a hurricane. On Oct. 23, at 11 a.m. EDT/1500 UTC, visible imagery from NOAA's GOES-West satellite showed that Raymond had moved slightly away from the Mexican coast. The image was created by NASA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA's Terra satellite flew over Lekima after it became a super-typhoon in the northwestern Pacific Ocean and captured visible and infrared data on the storm.

Early on Oct. 23 at 00:25 UTC/Oct. 22 at 8:25 p.m. EDT, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite was busy capturing data on Lekima. The MODIS image clearly showed Lekima's 20 nautical mile/23 mile/37 km-wide-eye with bands of thunderstorms wrapping tightly into the center of circulation.

NASA's TRMM satellite data provided forecasters at the National Hurricane Center with a good look at how wind shear is affecting Tropical Storm Lorenzo in the Atlantic Ocean.

You might think that a pair of parallel plates hanging motionless in a vacuum just a fraction of a micrometer away from each other would be like strangers passing in the night—so close but destined never to meet. Thanks to quantum mechanics, you would be wrong.

Scientists working to engineer nanoscale machines know this only too well as they have to grapple with quantum forces and all the weirdness that comes with them. These quantum forces, most notably the Casimir effect, can play havoc if you need to keep closely spaced surfaces from coming together.

On Oct. 22, 2013 Typhoon Francisco was already affecting the southern islands Japan when the TRMM satellite had a good view of its rainfall and cloud heights.

On Oct. 23, as Typhoon Francisco moved closer to Japan's southern islands, the Daito islands and islands of Okinawa (including Kadena Air Base) and Amami-Oshima were all receiving rainfall, gusty winds and strong surf. Those islands are under warnings and facing high waves, gale-force winds, storm surge and heavy rainfall.

Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy's got one. But how did they grow so big?

A paper in the journal Science pits the front-running ideas about the growth of supermassive black holes against observational data — a limit on the strength of gravitational waves from pairs of black holes, obtained with CSIRO's 64-m Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia.The study was jointly led by Dr Ryan Shannon, a Postdoctoral Fellow with CSIRO, and Mr Vikram Ravi, a PhD student co-supervised by the University of Melbourne (Australia) and CSIRO.

Typhoon Francisco was already spreading fringe clouds over southern Japan when NASA's Aqua satellite flew overhead and captured a picture of the storm from space.

A month ago Hurricane Manuel caused landslides and extensive flooding along Mexico's Pacific Ocean coast. Recently formed Hurricane Raymond is expected to cause heavy rainfall in nearly the same area. NASA's TRMM satellite measured the rate of heavy rainfall that Raymond was generating over the Mexican coast.

It took six hours for the thirteenth tropical depression of the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season to organize and strengthen into Tropical Storm Lorenzo. NASA's Aqua satellite captured a "before" image and NOAA's GOES satellite captured an "after" image of the depression's transition.