Heavens

Satellite imagery showed that Tropical Storm Pewa has passed Wake Island on Aug. 21. GOES-West satellite imagery showed Pewa moving farther into the northwestern Pacific.

Tropical Storm Pewa continues trekking through the open waters of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean today, and was captured on NASA satellite imagery.

Astronomers have found a clever new way to slice and dice the flickering light from a distant star in a way that reveals the strength of gravity at its surface.

That is important because a star's surface gravity is one of the key properties that astronomers use to calculate a star's physical properties and assess its evolutionary state.

In diagrams it looks like a confection of self-curling ribbon with bits of bling hung off the ribbon here and there. In fact it is a carefully designed ring of proteins with attached pigments that self-assembles into a structure that soaks up sunlight.

NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Typhoon Trami's center just north of Taiwan as it headed for landfall in eastern China.

Fires that started in July continue on in late August in Idaho and Montana. Actively burning areas, detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer's (MODIS) thermal bands, are outlined in red.

The study, by researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Miami, will help predict how coral reef distributions may change in response to changing oceans.

Coral are well known as the colourful plant-like structures which form coral reefs. However, each coral is actually a colony of anemone-like animals, which start out life as tiny, free-floating larvae about the size of a full-stop. Using a computer model, the researchers simulated how these young corals disperse in the world's oceans.

For the first time in more than 100 years, drug and dietary supplement manufacturers are updating the tests used to ensure that their products contain safe levels of metal impurities, and the stringent new requirements, instruments and costs are the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

CSIRO scientists have written software that could guide spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, show that the planet Nibiru doesn't exist … and prove that the Earth goes around the Sun.Dr George Hobbs (CSIRO) and his colleagues study pulsars — small spinning stars that deliver regular 'blips' or 'pulses' of radio waves and, sometimes, X-rays.

Maternity care that involves a midwife as the main care provider leads to better outcomes for most women, according to a systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. Researchers found that women who received continued care throughout pregnancy and birth from a small group of midwives were less likely to give birth pre-term and required fewer interventions during labour and birth than when their care was shared between different obstetricians, GPs and midwives.

This fall, NASA's Operation IceBridge will base its annual Antarctic campaign out of National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station, a change from the mission's previous four campaigns that were based in Punta Arenas, Chile. By switching bases of operations, IceBridge will be able to expand its reach by measuring parts of Antarctica previously unavailable to the mission.

Berkeley -- A new theory by fluid dynamics experts at the University of California, Berkeley, shows how "zombie vortices" help lead to the birth of a new star.

Reporting today (Tuesday, Aug. 20) in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus shows how variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form.

On August 20, 2013 at 4:24 am EDT, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME, a solar phenomenon which can send billions of tons of particles into space that can 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.

Tropical Storm Pewa weakened temporarily while facing adverse atmospheric conditions in the Northwestern Pacific, and NASA's Aqua satellite captured the storm in infrared light.

The Central Pacific Ocean has generated a third tropical depression this year and NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of Tropical Depression 03C far to the west of Hawaii.

NOAA's GOES-West satellite imagery from Aug. 20 at 1200 UTC/8 a.m. EDT showed a rounded tropical depression about 1,310 miles/2,105 km west of Lihue, Hawaii. The GOES image was created by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The GOES image shows the strongest thunderstorms around the depression's center.

Tropical Storm Trami may not be making landfall in the Philippines, but it was close enough to bring heavy rainfall when combined with monsoon rains. NASA's Aqua satellite captured those extensive rains in an infrared image when it passed overhead from space.