Heavens

Typhoon Soulik's eyewall appears to have rebuilt as evidenced in NASA satellite imagery. Soulik is approaching Taiwan and is forecast to make landfall in southeastern China over the weekend of July 13 and 14.

NOAA's GOES-13 satellite spotted the remnant clouds and showers from former Tropical Storm Chantal lingering over the Bahamas on July 12. Chantal's chances for regeneration are diminishing because of upper-level winds.

A visible image from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite at 9:45 a.m. EDT on July 12, 2013 showed Chantal's remnant clouds and showers moving north in the Atlantic. The image of Chantal's remnants resembled the sideways view of a jellyfish. The GOES image was created by NASA's GOES Project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

"All we need to produce narrow rings and other structures in our models of debris disks is a bit of gas, too little for us to detect today in most actual systems," said co-author Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Here's how it works. When high-energy ultraviolet light from the central star strikes a clump of dust and ice grains, it drives electrons off the particles. These high-speed electrons then collide with and heat nearby gas.

Drug use is common among street children, posing serious threats to both their health and their chances for reintegration into society. It's difficult to reduce drug use among street children without a good understanding of the problem, and up to now the research has been confined mainly to local studies with inconsistent results.

This week a European Earth-observing satellite confirmed that a large iceberg broke off of Pine Island Glacier, one of Antarctica's largest and fastest moving ice streams. The rift that led to the new iceberg was discovered in October 2011 during NASA's Operation IceBridge flights over the continent. The rift soon became the focus of international scientific attention. Seeing the rift grow and eventually form a 280-square-mile ice island gave researchers an opportunity to gather data that promises to improve our understanding of how glaciers calve.

Whenever a super typhoon or major hurricane has sustained winds over 100 knots (115 mph/185 kph), eyewall replacement occurs naturally. That happens because the eyewall is small, or it contracts and some of the outer bands of thunderstorms can strengthen and form a ring or outer eyewall. That outer ring moves inward and takes energy from the inner eyewall. During the replacement, a typhoon or hurricane weakens, as Soulik has done. Eventually the inner eyewall is replaced by the outer eyewall. Once the replacement is completed, the storm may re-intensify.

Tropical Storm Chantal moved over Hispaniola on July 10 when NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead from space, and less than twenty-four hours later the storm weakened to a remnant low pressure area.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Chantal when it was a tropical storm over Hispaniola on July 10 at 15:20 UTC (11:20 a.m. EDT). At that time, Chantal's northern quadrant covered the Dominican Republic and eastern Haiti while the center of the storm remained south of Hispaniola.

More support is needed to help women overcome doubts in the hope that they will breastfeed their babies for longer, says a University of Alberta nutrition researcher.

Astronomers making visible-light observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have deduced the actual color of a planet orbiting another star 63 light-years away.

The planet is HD 189733b, one of the closest exoplanets that can be seen crossing the face of its star.

A solar tsunami observed by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Japanese Hinode spacecraft has been used to provide the first accurate estimates of the Sun's magnetic field.

Solar tsunamis are produced by enormous explosions in the Sun's atmosphere called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). As the CME travels out into space, the tsunami travels across the Sun at speeds of up to 1000 kilometres per second.

A study published in the journal Animal Behaviour found that the noise of passing ships disrupts feeding for the common shore crab. Perhaps worse, the team from the Universities of Exeter and Bristol also found that when threatened, crabs took longer to retreat to shelter and lost their natural 'play dead' behaviour.

In coastal seas around the world noise caused by humans is a dominant feature, with construction and transportation fundamentally modifying ocean soundscapes.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have, for the first time, determined the true colour of a planet orbiting another star. If seen up close this planet, known as HD 189733b, would be a deep cobalt blue, reminiscent of Earth's colour as seen from space.

But that's where the similarities end. This "deep blue dot" is a huge gas giant orbiting very close to its host star. The planet's atmosphere is scorching with a temperature of over 1000 degrees Celsius, and it rains glass, sideways, in howling 7000 kilometre-per-hour winds [1].

One might expect that collisions between the remains of monstrous stars, with masses reaching 200-300 times that of our Sun, would be among the most spectacular phenomena in the Universe. Perhaps they are, but we will unfortunately probably never have the chance to find out. Astrophysicists from the Astronomical Observatory of the Faculty of Physics at University of Warsaw have discovered that the first such collisions will not occur until billions of years from now.

Victims of forced marriage and honour violence in the UK are hesitant to seek professional help because they are worried social workers will not understand their cultural differences, according to new research presented today at Royal Holloway University.

Researchers at Royal Holloway have called for social workers to receive mandatory training on sensitive issues surrounding different cultures and religious backgrounds, so that they understand that normal practices, such as involving family members, may not be the best solution in forced marriage cases.

On July 9, 2013, at 11:09 a.m. 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 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.