Heavens

On June 12, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of the Silver fire burning east of Silver City, New Mexico. In addition to producing gray smoke plumes, the fire spawned a pyrocumulus cloud—a tall, cauliflower-shaped cloud that billowed up above the smoke.

Tropical Depression 2 formed in the western Caribbean Sea during the early afternoon hours (Eastern Daylight Time) on June 17. NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured an image of the storm as it consolidated enough to become a tropical depression while approaching the coast of Belize. NOAA's GOES-13 satellite sits in a fixed orbit and monitors the weather in the eastern half of the continental United States and the Atlantic Ocean. NASA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland uses the data from GOES-13 and creates imagery.

When it comes to confronting childhood obesity, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conclude that community-based approaches are important. A systematic review of childhood obesity prevention programs found that community-based intervention programs that incorporate schools and focus on both diet and physical activity are more effective at preventing obesity in children. The results of the study appear online in Pediatrics.

Systems such as a beating heart or a power grid that depend on the synchronized movement of their parts could fall prey to an invisible and chaotic tug-of-war known as a "chimera." Sharing its name with the fire-breathing, zoologically patchy creature of Greek mythology, a chimera state arises among identical, rhythmically moving components — known as oscillators — when a few of those parts spontaneously fall out of sync while the rest remain synchronized.

SAN FRANCISCO—- Short-term use of antidepressants, combined with stress and a high-fat diet, is associated with long-term increases in body weight, a new animal study finds. The results were presented Sunday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Cases of pertussis, also known as whooping cough, are on the rise in the U.S., recently reaching their highest level in 50 years. The disease can be serious or even fatal to newborns who have not yet received vaccinations.

The proposed system (Augmented Lecture Feedback System – ALFs) seeks to improve communication between students and professors during large lecture classes like those frequently given at universities. The way they work is quite intuitive: the professor wears a pair of augmented reality glasses that enable him/her to see symbols above each student; the symbols indicate the person's state while this activity is taking place.

How does a social animal – mouse or human – gain dominance over his or her fellow creatures? A unique experiment conducted by Dr. Tali Kimchi and her team in the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department provides some unusual insight into the social behavior that enables a social hierarchy, complete with a head honcho, to form.

German motorists are willing to accept longer journey times and even detours if it means helping to ease the general traffic situation. This emerged from a recent user study carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS in cooperation with the Technische Universität Berlin.

According to the Australian Government Bureau of Meterology, "In the warm, dry and sunny winter and spring, when grasses are dead and fuels have dried, northern Australia becomes most susceptible to bushfires. Intense high-pressure systems over South Australia producing strong southeast to northeast winds increase the risk of bushfires."

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Chemists at Indiana University Bloomington have created a symmetrical, five-sided macrocycle that is easy to synthesize and has characteristics that may help expand the molecular tool box available to researchers in biology, chemistry and materials sciences.

It is a mystery that has stymied astrophysicists for decades: how do black holes produce so many high-power X-rays?

In a new study, astrophysicists from The Johns Hopkins University, NASA and the Rochester Institute of Technology bridged the gap between theory and observation by demonstrating that gas spiraling toward a black hole inevitably results in X-ray emissions.

A new study by astronomers at NASA, Johns Hopkins University and Rochester Institute of Technology confirms long-held suspicions about how stellar-mass black holes produce their highest-energy light.

Irvine, Calif., June 10, 2013 – New satellite imagery reveals that several areas across the United States are all but certain to suffer water-related catastrophes, including extreme flooding, drought and groundwater depletion.

The paper, to be published in Science this Friday, June 14, underscores the urgent need to address these current and rapidly emerging water issues at the national scale.

Irvine, Calif. – Ocean waters melting the undersides of Antarctic ice shelves, not icebergs calving into the sea, are responsible for most of the continent's ice loss, a study by UC Irvine and others has found.

The first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves discovered that basal melt, or ice dissolving from underneath, accounted for 55 percent of shelf loss from 2003 to 2008 – a rate much higher than previously thought. Ice shelves, floating extensions of glaciers, fringe 75 percent of the vast, frozen continent.