Heavens

NASA researchers have found that several volcanic deposits on Mercury's surface require mantle melting to have started close to the planet's core-mantle boundary, which lies only 400km below the planets surface and making it unique in the solar system. This is reported at the Goldschmidt conference in Yokohama, Japan.

An international team of scientists, led from Durham's Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), used new computer modelling of the Universe to investigate the colours that galaxies have and what those colours might tell us about how galaxies evolve.

Using the state-of-the-art EAGLE simulations, the researchers modelled how both the ages of stars in galaxies and what those stars are made from translate into the colour of light that they produce.

The research team said its simulations showed that colours of galaxies can also help diagnose how they evolve.

In a small study to determine the best way to assess the operating skills of would-be orthopaedic surgeons, Johns Hopkins researchers found that tracking the trainees' performance on cadavers using step-by-step checklists and measures of general surgical skills works well but should be coupled with an equally rigorous system for tracking errors.

Rochester Institute of Technology professors have developed a faster, more accurate way to assess gravitational wave signals and infer the astronomical sources that made them.

Their method directly compares data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory to cutting-edge numerical simulations of binary black holes, including simulations performed at RIT.

The long-lasting effects of El Niño are projected to cause an intense fire season in the Amazon, according to the 2016 seasonal fire forecast from scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine.

El Niño conditions in 2015 and early 2016 altered rainfall patterns around the world. In the Amazon, El Niño reduced rainfall during the wet season, leaving the region drier at the start of the 2016 dry season than any year since 2002, according to NASA satellite data.

In the face of climate change impact and inevitable sea level rise, Cornell and Scenic Hudson scientists studying New York's Hudson River estuary have forecast new intertidal wetlands, comprising perhaps 33 percent more wetland area by the year 2100.

"In other parts of the world, sea level rise has led to net losses of tidal wetland and to permanent inundation," said Magdeline Laba, Cornell senior research associate in soil and crop sciences.

Tropical Cyclone 02A in the Arabian Sea east of Oman has been weakening and has become a tropical depression. The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM mission core satellite analyzed the rainfall in the system.

On June 28 at 1800 UTC (2 p.m. EDT) the Joint Typhoon Warning Center issued its final bulletin on Tropical Cyclone 02A. At that time, the storm had weakened to a depression with maximum sustained winds near 30 knots. It was located about 248 nautical miles east of Masirah Island, Oman. The depression was moving to the south-southwest at 2 knots and weakening.

Ocean acidification makes it harder for sea snails to escape from their sea star predators, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B, suggest that by disturbing predator-prey interactions, ocean acidification could spur cascading consequences for food web systems in shoreline ecosystems.

For instance, black turban snails graze on algae. If more snails are eaten by predators, algae densities could increase.

The Universe is becoming gradually cleaner as more and more cosmic dust is being mopped up by the formation of stars within galaxies, an international team of astronomers has revealed.

Peering back 12 billion years using the Herschel space telescope to produce far-infrared images of the sky, the team led by researchers at Cardiff University has been able to observe the very early formation of galaxies and compare them to galaxies that have formed much more recently.

Tropical Cyclone 02A made its way west across the Arabian Sea and NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the storm when it was just off the coast of Oman. Infrared data showed the storm was beginning to elongate from wind shear.

Infrared data taken from NASA's Aqua satellite on June 27, 2016 at 2159 UTC (5:59 p.m. EDT) showed cold cloud top temperatures in strong storms just off the coast of Oman. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument flies aboard Aqua. AIRS data was made into a false-colored infrared image at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a cosmic tadpole, with its bright head and elongated tail, wriggling through the inky black pool of space. Tadpole galaxies are rare and difficult to find in the local Universe. This striking example, named LEDA 36252, was explored as part of a Hubble study into their mysterious properties -- with interesting results.

Fog, blizzards, gusts of wind - poor weather can often make the operation of rescue helicopters a highly risky business, and sometimes even impossible. A new helmet-mounted display, developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), may in the future be able to help pilots detect hazards at an early stage, even when their visibility is severely impaired: the information required to do this is created in an on-board computer and imported into digital eye glasses. A new study has shown that this augmented reality improves the performance of pilots.

The media often imply that the goal of the hunt for extrasolar planets is to find a rocky planet about the size of Earth orbiting a star like the sun at a distance that would allow liquid water to persist on its surface. In other words, the goal is to find Earth 2.0.

But there are reasons to be interested in the other worlds even if they couldn't possibly harbor life. The hot, rocky planets, for example, offer rare and precious clues to the character and evolution of the early Earth.

For about two decades, astronomers have known about an object called VLA J213002.08+120904 (VLA J2130+12 for short). Although it is close to the line of sight to the globular cluster M15, most astronomers had thought that this source of bright radio waves was probably a distant galaxy.

A new algorithm clusters the millions of peptide mass spectra in the PRIDE Archive public database, making it easier to detect millions of consistently unidentified spectra across different datasets. Published in Nature Methods, the new tool is an important step towards fully exploiting data produced in discovery proteomics experiments.