Heavens

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite detected hundreds of fires burning in the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola on May 01, 2013. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires burn in grass or cropland.

NGC 6559 is a cloud of gas and dust located at a distance of about 5000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The glowing region is a relatively small object, just a few light-years across, in contrast to the one hundred light-years and more spanned by its famous neighbour, the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8, eso0936 - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso0936/).

When people create and modify their virtual reality avatars, the hardships faced by their alter egos can influence how they perceive virtual environments, according to researchers.

A group of students who saw that a backpack was attached to an avatar that they had created overestimated the heights of virtual hills, just as people in real life tend to overestimate heights and distances while carrying extra weight, according to Sangseok You, a doctoral student in the school of information, University of Michigan.

There may be a way for older people to prevent natural aging of their minds, and it could be as simple as playing a video game.

That's according to a study from the University of Iowa, which found that elderly people who played just ten hours of a game priming their mental processing speed and skills delayed declines by as many as seven years in a range of cognitive skills.

In an effort to determine if conditions were ever right on Mars to sustain life, a team of scientists, including a Michigan State University professor, has examined a meteorite that formed on the red planet more than a billion years ago.

And although this team's work is not specifically solving the mystery, it is laying the groundwork for future researchers to answer this age-old question.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of Cyclone Zane headed toward the northern Cape York Peninsula of Queensland where it is expected to make landfall by May 2 and cross into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

A cyclone Warning is in effect for coastal areas from Mapoon to Cape York to Cape Flattery.

According to the Cape Cod Times of April 30, 2013: "The Massachusetts Army National Guard's Natural Resource Program is conducting a prescribed burn at the Upper Cape base. The burn will be held in partnership with federal, state and non-profit agencies. The objective of the burn is to reduce the risk of wildfire by eliminating the heavy buildup of dead wood and debris that can act as fuel. Prescribed burns also manage the habitat for endangered and rare species on the 22,000 acre base. Local fire departments receive training during the prescribed burns.

Our global networks have generated many benefits and new opportunities. However, they have also established highways for failure propagation, which can ultimately result in man-made disasters. For example, today's quick spreading of emerging epidemics is largely a result of global air traffic, with serious impacts on global health, social welfare, and economic systems.

Using the same devious mechanism that enables some bacteria to shrug off powerful antibiotics, scientists have developed solar-powered nanofilters that remove antibiotics from the water in lakes and rivers twice as efficiently as the best existing technology. Their report appears in ACS' journal Nano Letters.

NASA scientists don't often learn that their spacecraft is at risk of crashing into another satellite. But when Julie McEnery, the project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, checked her email on March 29, 2012, she found herself facing this precise situation.

While Fermi is in fine shape today, continuing its mission to map the highest-energy light in the universe, the story of how it sidestepped a potential disaster offers a glimpse at an underappreciated aspect of managing a space mission: orbital traffic control.

In Western Australia, the wet season occurs between December and March and the dry season between May and October. The reversals of prevailing winds in the two season drives the shift from wet to dry and back.

In April and May, fires usually burn themselves out within a few days due to the fact that even though there are dry spots that may catch fire, the wet area around them will keep the fires from burning out of control. The worst time for fire is late in the dry season, when vegetation has dried to tinder and blazes tend to be uncontrollable, intense, and dangerous.

Infrared data indicates temperatures of cloud tops and the surface of the sea beneath tropical cyclones, and NASA's AIRS instrument captured an infrared look at low pressure area System 92P in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean that hinted it was rapidly developing into Tropical Cyclone Zane. Zane is expected to make landfall in northeastern Queensland on May 1 at cyclone strength.

Even as the snow begins to retreat in the eastern part of Russia, fires are being set to clear the land for planting. This Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image from the Aqua satellite was captured on April 29, 2013. MODIS shows the fires as red dots on this image and also visible are smoke plumes rising from the fires which are most likely the result of growing-season activities for farmer in the region.

HOUSTON – (April 30, 2013) – Women engineers are underpaid for their contributions to technical activities, due to cultural ideologies in the engineering profession, according to Rice University research.

"Cultural ideologies within professions may seem benign and have little salience outside of a profession's boundaries, but may play an important role in wage inequality," said Rice Assistant Professor of Sociology Erin Cech.

Staring at a small patch of sky for more than 50 hours with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have for the first time identified discrete sources that account for nearly all the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. They found that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies with gorging black holes at their cores and the remaining 37 percent comes from galaxies that are rapidly forming stars.