Heavens

Cyclone Victoria continued to intensify overnight from April 9 to April 10, and imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed a tighter storm circulation and a possible eye developing.

On April 10, 2013 at 0300 UTC, Victoria had maximum sustained winds near 60 knots (69 mph/111 kph). Victoria was located near 15.2 south and 103.8 east, about 735 nautical miles northwest of Learmonth, Australia. Victoria was moving to the south-southeast at 8 knots (9 mph/15 kph).

Cyclone Imelda has continues to strengthen, and infrared NASA satellite imagery indicated powerful convection throughout the storm.

Infrared satellite imagery indicates cloud top temperatures, and the colder the temperatures, the higher the cloud top is in the troposphere. Higher cloud tops indicate stronger uplift in the air, and that means stronger thunderstorms can develop. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Cyclone Victoria on April 9 at 0935 UTC (05:35 a.m. EDT), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument captured infrared data on the strengthening cyclone.

There are a number of fires burning in Victoria, Australia and smoke and heat signatures were captured from them by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. The image was taken on April 9, 2013 at 04:35 UTC (12:35 a.m. EDT). The smoke plumes appear as a light brown color and the fires appear as a red area. In the southeast, smoke is streaming over the Tasman Sea.

Dozens of red hot spots cluster at the tip of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. To the south, fires also speckle the neck of the Yucatan, Guatemala, and Belize. Each hot spot, which appears as a red mark, is an area where the thermal detectors on the MODIS instrument recognized temperatures higher than background. When accompanied by plumes of smoke, as in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for fire.

Agricultural fires are set all over the world at different times to prepare the soil for the planting of new crops. In India and Nepal several dozens agricultural fires have been set and are burning in this image from April 06, 2013. This natural-color satellite image was collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red.

The sun emitted a mid-level flare, peaking at 3:16 a.m. EDT on April 11, 2013.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.

Fires purposely set to burn crop residues and get the land ready for the growing season are continuing as evidenced in this image from the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite. A longer, more detailed account of these types of fires can be found at this URL: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/world/20130326-indochina.html.

Many plumes of smoke from fires burning across the southeastern United States of America can be seen here. The fires are affecting several states including Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and Florida.

There are currently over 1000 new fires in the past week across the South. There were 17 new large fires with 3 being uncontained as well as numerous smaller ones. A "large fire" is defined by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) as a wildfire of 100 acres or more occurring in timber, or a wildfire of 300 acres or more occurring in grass/sage.

In order to improve a simulation designed to study the evolution of the solar system through time, numerical mathematical methods have been developed at the Computing Faculty of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Specifically, the methods proposed enable the simulation calculations to be done faster and more accurately.

Chicago (April 10, 2013)—A major challenge facing today's health care community is to find ways to lower costs without compromising clinical quality. Taking that challenge to task, researchers at Medstar Health and Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington DC, report success in using a concept called "value-based analysis," which simultaneously measures quality and cost and addresses inefficiencies in care.

Stars the size of the Sun end their lives as tiny and faint white dwarf stars. But as they make the final transition into retirement their atmospheres are blown away into space. For a few tens of thousands of years they are surrounded by the spectacular and colourful glowing clouds of ionised gas known as planetary nebulae.

SALT LAKE CITY, April 10, 2013 – University of Utah researchers developed a high-speed camera system that spent the past two winters photographing snowflakes in 3-D as they fell – and they don't look much like those perfect-but-rare snowflakes often seen in photos.

"Until our device, there was no good instrument for automatically photographing the shapes and sizes of snowflakes in free-fall," says Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences. "We are photographing these snowflakes completely untouched by any device, as they exist naturally in the air."

In South Africa, people with HIV who start treatment with anti-AIDS drugs (antiretroviral therapy) have life expectancies around 80% of that of the general population provided that they start treatment before their CD4 count drops below 200 (cells per microliter), according to a study by South African researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

Geckos are known for their sticky adhesive toes that allow them to stick to, climb on, and run along surfaces in any orientation--even upside down! But until recently, it was not well understood how geckos kept their sticking ability even on wet surfaces, as are common in the tropical regions in which most geckos live. A 2012 study in which geckos slipped on wet glass perplexed scientists trying to unlock the key to gecko adhesion in climates with plentiful rain and moisture.

Rising temperatures will lead to a massive "greening" of the Arctic by mid-century, as a result of marked increases in plant cover, according to research supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of its International Polar Year (IPY) portfolio.

The greening not only will have effects on plant life, the researchers noted, but also on the wildlife that depends on vegetation for cover. The greening could also have a multiplier effect on warming, as dark vegetation absorbs more solar radiation than ice, which reflects sunlight.