Heavens

DURHAM, N.H. – Although scientists involved in NASA's Van Allen Probes mission were confident they would eventually be able to rewrite the textbook on Earth's twin radiation belts, getting material for the new edition just two days after launch was surprising, momentous, and gratifying.

Washington, D.C.— Mineral evolution is a new way to look at our planet's history. It's the study of the increasing diversity and characteristics of Earth's near-surface minerals, from the dozen that arrived on interstellar dust particles when the Solar System was formed to the more than 4,700 types existing today. New research on a mineral called molybdenite by a team led by Robert Hazen at Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory provides important new insights about the changing chemistry of our planet as a result of geological and biological processes.

With the flip of a switch, a pair of instruments designed and built by the University of Colorado Boulder and flying onboard twin NASA space probes have forced the revision of a 50-year-old theory about the structure of the radiation belts that wrap around the Earth just a few thousand miles above our heads.

Using new technology at the telescope and in laboratories, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars.

An international team led by Sascha Quanz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) has studied the disc of gas and dust that surrounds the young star HD 100546, a relatively nearby neighbour located 335 light-years from Earth. They were surprised to find what seems to be a planet in the process of being formed, still embedded in the disc of material around the young star. The candidate planet would be a gas giant similar to Jupiter.

WEST CHESTER, Pa., February 28, 2013 – Animas Corporation announced today positive results from the second phase of human clinical trials of a first-generation, closed-loop insulin delivery system in development, designed to predict a rise or fall in blood glucose and correspondingly increase, decrease, suspend and resume insulin delivery. The data were presented at the Advanced Technologies & Treatments for Diabetes (ATTD) Conference in Paris, France.

Canola, cottonseed, and sunflower products can replace soybean meal in diets fed to pigs, but they contain less protein and energy. To determine if it makes economic sense to use them, producers need to know the concentrations and digestibility of the nutrients they contain. To help them make the decision, University of Illinois researchers examined amino acid digestibility for these products.

Starch-based intravenous (IV) fluids used by the NHS to treat seriously ill patients are causing unnecessary deaths, according to a new Cochrane systematic review by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Based on data from 25 randomised control trials, the researchers concluded that starch-based colloid fluids, used to stabilise patients with low blood pressure, are not only more expensive than saline-based crystalloid fluids, but may also be causing around 250 unnecessary deaths in the UK every year.

The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River's mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA's Aquarius instrument.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Its wide-eyed Large Area Telescope (LAT) sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light -- gamma rays -- from sources across the universe. These range from supermassive black holes billions of light-years away to intriguing objects in our own galaxy, such as X-ray binaries, supernova remnants and pulsars.

An international team including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists has definitively measured the spin rate of a supermassive black hole for the first time.

The findings, made by the two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, solve a long-standing debate about similar measurements in other black holes and will lead to a better understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve.

BOSTON (February 27, 2013, embargoed until 1 p.m. US ET) — A study published today in the journal Nature reports that a viral predator of the cholera bacteria has stolen the functional immune system of bacteria and is using it against its bacterial host. The study provides the first evidence that this type of virus, the bacteriophage ("phage" for short), can acquire a wholly functional and adaptive immune system.

Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across - eight times the distance from Earth to the Moon - spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light. Such an object exists: the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365.

Astronomers measured its jaw-dropping spin rate using new data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellites.

Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova.

A supernova discovered Feb. 6 exploded about 450 million years ago, said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who made the initial observation.

The exploding star is in a relatively empty portion of the sky labeled "anonymous" in the faint constellation Canes Venatici. Home to a handful of galaxies, Canes Venatici is near the constellation Ursa Major, best known for the Big Dipper.

An infrared look at Tropical Storm 18S by NASA's Aqua satellite revealed wind shear continues to take its toll on the storm and keeps pushing its main precipitation away from the center of the storm.

Wind shear is a major factor that can keep a tropical cyclone "down" or unable to consolidate and intensify because it keeps pounding the circulation of winds head on. Strong wind shear has been battering Tropical Cyclone 18S for a couple of days and is expected to continue the next couple of days.