Heavens

NEW YORK — A new study from researchers at leading business schools reveals that expansive physical settings (e.g. having a big desk to stretch out while doing work or a large driver's seat in an automobile) can cause individuals to feel more powerful, and in turn these feelings of power can elicit more dishonest behavior such as stealing, cheating, and even traffic violations.

We now understand the nature of the giant storms on Saturn. Through the analysis of images sent from the Cassini space probe belonging to the North American and European space agencies (NASA and ESA respectively), as well as the computer models of the storms and the examination of the clouds therein, the Planetary Sciences Group of the University of the Basque Country has managed to explain the behaviour of these storms for the very first time.

New research shows that to prevent starvation at night, plants perform accurate arithmetic division. The calculation allows them to use up their starch reserves at a constant rate so that they run out almost precisely at dawn.

"This is the first concrete example in a fundamental biological process of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation," said mathematical modeller Professor Martin Howard from the John Innes Centre.

WEST CHESTER, Pa., June 21, 2013 – Animas Corporation announced today further promising results from the second phase of human clinical trials of a first-generation closed-loop insulin delivery system in development. Data investigating the predictive Hypoglycemia-Hyperglycemia Minimizer (HHM) System* demonstrated that the system is capable of maintaining safe glucose levels overnight. The data was presented at the 73rd Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in Chicago, Illinois.

Irvine, Calif. – UC Irvine and Mayo Clinic researchers have found that vitamin D levels in the U.S. population peak in August and bottom out in February. The essential vitamin – necessary for healthy bones – is produced in the skin upon exposure to ultraviolet B rays from the sun.

Surrounding Earth is a dynamic region called the magnetosphere. The region is governed by magnetic and electric forces, incoming energy and material from the sun, and a vast zoo of waves and processes unlike what is normally experienced in Earth-bound physics. Nestled inside this constantly changing magnetic bubble lies a donut of charged particles generally aligned with Earth's equator.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured this image of nearby spiral galaxy Messier 61, also known as NGC 4303. The galaxy, located only 55 million light-years away from Earth, is roughly the size of the Milky Way, with a diameter of around 100 000 light-years.

The galaxy is notable for one particular reason — six supernovae have been observed within Messier 61, a total that places it in the top handful of galaxies alongside Messier 83, also with six, and NGC 6946, with a grand total of nine observed supernovae.

On June 20, 2013, at 11:24 p.m., 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.

Materials scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have found an accurate way to explain the magnetic properties of a compound that has mystified the scientific community for decades.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua spacecraft captured this infrared image of Tropical Storm Barry in the Gulf of Mexico's Bay of Campeche at 07:53 UTC (3:53 a.m. EDT) on June 20, 2013, as the storm was about to make landfall in southern Mexico. At the time, Barry had maximum sustained winds of 40 knots (46 miles per hour, or 74 kilometers per hour), gusting to 50 knots (58 miles per hour, or 93 kilometers per hour).

On June 19, 2013, NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites captured striking images of smoke billowing from illegal wildfires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The smoke blew east toward southern Malaysia and Singapore, and news media reported that thick clouds of haze had descended on Singapore, pushing pollution levels to record levels.

Although modern Indian and Javan rhinos have a single horn on their noses, the extinct one-horned rhino Elasmotherium was a source of the unicorn legend because it had a two meter-long horn on its forehead and lived with prehistoric humans that drew its image on cave paintings. All other elasmotheres had a weak or strong nasal horn, whereas Elasmotherium lost its ancestral nasal horn and instead developed a long frontal horn. Dr.

The autonomous flying of multiple UAVs in formation is an important research area in the aerospace field. Professor DUAN Haibin and his group members (LUO Qinan and YU Yaxiang) from the Science and Technology in Aircraft Control Laboratory, School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University set out to tackle this problem. Through 5 years of innovative research, they investigated the trophallactic mechanism behind social insects and developed a novel trophallaxis network control method for formation flight.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Researchers at MIT have proposed a new system that combines ferroelectric materials — the kind often used for data storage — with graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon known for its exceptional electronic and mechanical properties. The resulting hybrid technology could eventually lead to computer and data-storage chips that pack more components in a given area and are faster and less power-hungry.

This striking NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, which shows what looks like the profile of a celestial bird, belies the fact that close encounters between galaxies are a messy business.

This interacting galaxy duo is collectively called Arp 142. The pair contains the disturbed, star-forming spiral galaxy NGC 2936, along with its elliptical companion, NGC 2937 at lower left.