Heavens

Cloud top temperatures warmed up on NASA infrared imagery, indicating that the uplift in Tropical Storm Pewa was waning. By Aug. 23, Pewa was reduced to a tropical depression. Infrared imagery also showed that wind shear has pushed Pewa's precipitation away from the storm's center.

The ninth tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season strengthened into Tropical Storm Ivo on Aug. 23 as NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead. Ivo is expected to bring heavy surf and rainfall to southern Baja California over the next couple of days.

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission/TRMM satellite captured the rainfall rates occurring in Tropical Storm Ivo on Aug. 23 at 0815 UTC/4:15 a.m. EDT. TRMM noticed some thunderstorms were reaching heights of 7.4 miles /12 km, and the heaviest rainfall was falling at a rate of 1.18 inches/30 mm per hour.

A new statistical framework

Rethinking the traditional, ad hoc approach, Pedersen and Weng have proposed a new state-space model for analyzing fish movement data collected by marine observation networks. Their new model was recently published in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Its goal is to quantify the uncertainty associated with this imperfect locating system, and to improve its accuracy.

A view of the Pacific Ocean from NOAA's GOES-West satellite caught Tropical Storm Pewa moving through the Northwestern part of the ocean and two developing low pressure areas, one designated System 94E, several hundred miles off the Mexican coast.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Typhoon Trami during the time it was making landfall in eastern China and captured an infrared view of the storm.

Typhoon Trami made landfall late on Aug. 21, and the storm was captured in infrared light by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder/AIRS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. The AIRS image, taken on Aug. 21 at 17:59 UTC/1:59 p.m. EDT showed that the most powerful thunderstorms were tightly wrapped around the storm's center during landfall.

Astronomers have assembled, from more than 13 years of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a series of time-lapse movies showing a jet of superheated gas -- 5,000 light-years long -- as it is ejected from a supermassive black hole.

The movies promise to give astronomers a better understanding of how black holes shape galaxy evolution.

This news release is available in German.

Plant residues in cooking pots reveal the use of spices in prehistoric cuisine in northern Europe, according to research published August 21 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Hayley Saul and colleagues from the University of York.

Our early ancestors had a taste for spicy food, new research led by the University of York has revealed.

Archaeologists at York, working with colleagues in Denmark, Germany and Spain, have found evidence of the use of spices in cuisine at the transition to agriculture. The researchers discovered traces of garlic mustard on the charred remains of pottery dating back nearly 7,000 years.

On August 21, 2013 at 1:24 am EDT, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, or CME, a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of particles into space and reach Earth one to three days later. These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground.

During its five-year primary mission, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has given astronomers an increasingly detailed portrait of the universe's most extraordinary phenomena, from giant black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies to thunderstorms on Earth.

But its job is not done yet. On Aug. 11, Fermi entered an extended phase of its mission -- a deeper study of the high-energy cosmos. This is a significant step toward the science team's planned goal of a decade of observations, ending in 2018.

While the 138,000-acre Silver Fire still smoldered, forest restoration specialists were on the job. They analyzed maps created using Landsat satellite data to determine where the burn destroyed vegetation and exposed soil – and where to focus emergency restoration efforts.

"The map looked like a big red blob," said Penny Luehring, the U.S. Forest Service's Burned Area Emergency Response and watershed improvement program leader, based in Albuquerque, N.M.

The international Daya Bay Collaboration has announced new results about the transformations of neutrinos - elusive, ghostlike particles that carry invaluable clues about the makeup of the early universe. The latest findings include the collaboration's first data on how neutrino oscillation – in which neutrinos mix and change into other "flavors," or types, as they travel – varies with neutrino energy, allowing the measurement of a key difference in neutrino masses known as "mass splitting."

Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers from three institutions has developed a new type of telescope camera that makes higher resolution images than ever before, the culmination of 20 years of effort. The team has been developing this technology at telescope observatories in Arizona and now has deployed the latest version of these cameras in the high desert of Chile at the Magellan 6.5m (21 foot) telescope.

Astronomers at the University of Arizona, the Arcetri Observatory near Florence, Italy and the Carnegie Observatory have developed a new type of camera that allows scientists to take sharper images of the night sky than ever before.

The team has been developing this technology for more than 20 years at observatories in Arizona, most recently at the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, and has now deployed the latest version of these cameras in the high desert of Chile at the Magellan 6.5-meter telescope.