Heavens

Storm Surges Happening on Aug. 30

According to gauges from the National Ocean Service on Aug. 30 at 8.a.m EDT at New Canal Station, Louisiana a storm surge of near 6 feet was still occurring on the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain and a storm surge near 5 feet was occurring at Waveland, Mississippi.

Isaac in 3-D Shows Powerful, Towering Thunderstorms

Small patches of ice could make up at most five to ten percent of material in walls of Shackleton crater.Scientists using the Mini-RF radar on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have estimated the maximum amount of ice likely to be found inside a permanently shadowed lunar crater located near the moon's South Pole. As much as five to ten percent of material, by weight, could be patchy ice, according to the team of researchers led by Bradley Thomson at Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing, in Mass.

This composite image shows a superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light years from Earth.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., August 30, 2012 — Los Alamos National Laboratory expertise in radiation detection and shielding is poised to help a national team of scientists better understand a mysterious region that can create hazardous space weather near our home planet.

Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn't be happier…

An international research team, led by Edo Berger of Harvard University, made the most of a dying star's fury to probe a distant galaxy some 9.5 billion light-years distant. The dying star, which lit the galactic scene, is the most distant stellar explosion of its kind ever studied. According to Berger, "It's like someone turned on a flashlight in a dark room and suddenly allowed us to see, for a short time, what this far-off galaxy looks like, what it is composed of."

In a Physics World special report on Japan, Dennis Normile reports on how the Japanese space agency JAXA plans to land a spacecraft onto an asteroid in 2018 to search for clues of how life began on Earth.

Hayabusa 2 will be JAXA's second attempt at collecting material from an asteroid, after its first mission returned to Earth in June 2010. Hayabusa 2 will be launched in 2014 with a view to settling on the targeted asteroid, named 1999 JU3, in mid-2018 before arriving back on Earth in 2020.

Tropical Storm Bolaven made landfall on Aug. 28 and has been moving quickly over land while undergoing a transition. NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of the remnants of the ex-tropical storm mostly centered over eastern China.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of Tropical Storm Bolaven on August 29 at 0220 UTC. Some clouds still remain over North Korea and extend over the Sea of Japan as Bolaven's remnants continue speeding to the north-northeast at 29 knots (33.3 mph/53.7 kmh).

Hurricane Isaac made two landfalls in southeastern Louisiana. Isaac's first landfall occurred in southeastern Louisiana on Aug. 28 at 7:45 p.m. EDT (1145 UTC), second landfall on Aug. 29 at 6 a.m. EDT (1000 UTC). NASA's TRMM satellite observed heavy rainfall in this slow moving storm, which leads to higher rainfall totals and flooding.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—If you're diabetic or prone to diabetes, having a steady job appears to be good for your health, and not just because of the insurance coverage.

A new University of Michigan study found that that jobless working-age people with diabetes are less likely to adhere to their oral anti-diabetic medications than diabetics who are employed. Further, people of working age with diabetes are more likely to be unemployed than those who do not have diabetes.

Oxford, August 29, 2012 - The Moon is believed to have formed from a collision, 4.5 billion years ago, between Earth and an impactor the size of Mars, known as "Theia." Over the past decades scientists have simulated this process and reproduced many of the properties of the Earth-Moon system; however, these simulations have also given rise to a problem known as the Lunar Paradox: the Moon appears to be made up of material that would not be expected if the current collision theory is correct.

WASHINGTON –- U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Tactical Satellite-4 successfully completes three weeks of intense testing, June 28, as part of the Navy's annual Trident Warrior Experiment 2012 (TW12). TacSat-4 is a Navy-led Joint mission that provides Ultra High Frequency (UHF) satellite communications (SATCOM).

Oxford, August 29, 2012 - The Moon is believed to have formed from a collision, 4.5 billion years ago, between Earth and an impactor the size of Mars, known as "Theia." Over the past decades scientists have simulated this process and reproduced many of the properties of the Earth-Moon system; however, these simulations have also given rise to a problem known as the Lunar Paradox: the Moon appears to be made up of material that would not be expected if the current collision theory is correct.

Two identical FLOYDS spectrographs, installed in recent weeks at telescopes 6,000 miles apart, robotically acquired a supernovae target this week. Due to the level of precision required and the difficulty involved, few if any, other ground-based spectrographs have ever achieved this milestone.

The system, known as Kepler-47, harbours the smallest known transiting circumbinary planets -- planets orbiting a pair of stars -- to date. The planets were discovered using NASA's Kepler space telescope [1] by monitoring thefaint drop in brightness produced when both planets transit (eclipse) their host stars [2].

University of Adelaide researchers are working with colleagues in Italy to produce better quality pasta that also adds greater value to human health.