Heavens

In 2011, a months-long blast of energy launched by an enormous black hole almost 11 billion years ago swept past Earth. Using a combination of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the world's largest radio telescope, astronomers have zeroed in on the source of this ancient outburst.

Theorists expect gamma-ray outbursts occur only in close proximity to a galaxy's central black hole, the powerhouse ultimately responsible for the activity. A few rare observations suggested this is not the case.

Once a cyclone, now a tropical depression, Sonamu is being battered by moderate wind shear and an intrusion of dry air is it has practically stalled in the South China Sea.

Despite wide investments nationally in electronic medical records and related tools, the cost-saving promise of health information technology has not been reached because the systems deployed are neither interconnected nor easy to use, according to a new RAND Corporation analysis.

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a wondrous place full of huge star clusters, dust clouds, magnetic filaments and a supermassive black hole. But it can be a confusing place, too, posing challenges to astronomers trying to image these exotic features and learn more about where they are located in the galaxy.

Comets trailing wispy tails across the night sky are a beautiful byproduct of our solar system's formation, icy leftovers from 4.6 billion years ago when the planets coalesced from rocky rubble.

The discovery by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Clarion University in Pennsylvania of six likely comets around distant stars suggests that comets – dubbed "exocomets" – are just as common in other stellar systems with planets.

The quest for a twin Earth is heating up. Using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of Kepler data shows that about 17 percent of stars have an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than Mercury. Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there.

New York, NY—January 7, 2013—Columbia Engineering's Computer Science PhD candidate Ang Cui and Computer Science Professor Salvatore Stolfo have found serious vulnerabilities in Cisco VoIP (voice over internet protocol) telephones, devices used around the world by a broad range of networked organizations from governments to banks to major corporations, and beyond. In particular, they have discovered troubling security breaches with Cisco's VoIP phone technology.

The surprising discovery of a massive outburst in a neighboring galaxy is giving astronomers a tantalizing look at what likely is a powerful belch by a gorging black hole at the galaxy's center. The scientists were conducting a long-term study of molecules in galaxies, when one of the galaxies showed a dramatic change.

Understanding how thoughts of mortality influence individuals' beliefs sheds light on the commonalities among different groups' motivations and could help ease tensions between opposing viewpoints, according to University of Missouri experiments that tested the relationship between awareness of death and belief in a higher power. The study found that thoughts of death increased atheists, Christians, Muslims and agnostics conviction in their own world views.

AURORA, Colo. (Jan. 7, 2013) – New research from the Children's Outcomes Research Program at Children's Hospital Colorado shows that timely reminders by state or local health departments are more effective at increasing immunization rates among preschool children than those from primary care practices.

The study, published December 13 in the American Journal of Public Health, underscores the importance of partnerships between state and county health departments and primary care practices to keep children up-to-date on recommended vaccines.

An international team of astrophysicists has shown that planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if the systems had two stellar companions with tighter orbits around each other.

The team, led by Northwestern University's Nathan Kaib, conducted 3,000 computer simulations to study the effects of binary stellar companions (some with tight orbits around each other and others with wide or distant orbits) on the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

Volunteers from the Planethunters.org website, part of the Oxford University-led Zooniverse project, have discovered 15 new planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars.

Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a 'traffic jam' of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life.

Although immigrants from Italy and their offspring form one of the largest demographic groups in Switzerland, there are hardly any studies on their state of health and risk of mortality. In a first for Switzerland, Silvan Tarnutzer and Matthias Bopp from the University of Zurich's Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine calculated unbiased mortality risks for people with an Italian migrant background.

Immigrants from Italy live longer than Swiss people

TORONTO, ON – An international team of astrophysicists has shown that planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them.

Cyclone Dumile is on a solo journey in a southeasterly direction over the open waters of the Southern Indian Ocean over the weekend of Jan. 5 and 6. NASA's Aqua satellite captured a stunning visible image of Dumile as it left La Reunion and Mauritius behind.