Heavens

Washington, D.C.— Comets and asteroids preserve the building blocks of our Solar System and should help explain its origin. But there are unsolved puzzles. For example, how did icy comets obtain particles that formed at high temperatures, and how did these refractory particles acquire rims with different compositions? Carnegie's theoretical astrophysicist Alan Boss and cosmochemist Conel Alexander* are the first to model the trajectories of such particles in the unstable disk of gas and dust that formed the Solar System.

Rapid intensification of tropical cyclones is still somewhat of a mystery to forecasters, but one marker that NASA scientists confirmed is when "hot towers" appear within a tropical cyclone as they did in Typhoon Vicente before it exploded in strength on July 23. Vicente made landfall in southern China on July 23.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers have found a way to use GPS to measure short-term changes in the rate of ice loss on Greenland – and reveal a surprising link between the ice and the atmosphere above it.

The study, published in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hints at the potential for GPS to detect many consequences of climate change, including ice loss, the uplift of bedrock, changes in air pressure – and perhaps even sea level rise.

WASHINGTON -- For several days this month, Greenland's surface icecover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover ofGreenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its 2-mile-thickcenter, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, accordingto measurements from three independent satellites analyzed by NASAand university scientists.

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. -- A large inflatable heat shield developed by NASA's Space Technology Program has successfully survived a trip through Earth's atmosphere while travelling at hypersonic speeds up to 7,600 mph.

Thanks to tiny microneedles, eye doctors may soon have a better way to treat diseases such as macular degeneration that affect tissues in the back of the eye. That could be important as the population ages and develops more eye-related illnesses – and as pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs that otherwise could only be administered by injecting into the eye with a hypodermic needle.

Washington, D.C. — In order to understand Earth's earliest history--its formation from Solar System material into the present-day layering of metal core and mantle, and crust--scientists look to meteorites. New research from a team including Carnegie's Doug Rumble and Liping Qin focuses on one particularly old type of meteorite called diogenites. These samples were examined using an array of techniques, including precise analysis of certain elements for important clues to some of the Solar System's earliest chemical processing. Their work is published online July 22 by Nature Geoscience.

Dark energy makes up about 70 percent of the current content of the Universe and thus holds the ultimate fate of our Universe. Several possible scenarios are possible depending on the properties of dark energy; one is that the Universe will end in a so-called big rip. This interesting topic was recently explored by five researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Northeastern University, and Peking University.

NASA's Aqua satellite has been tracking the remnants of Tropical Depression Khanun, and infrared data revealed that it has moved over northeastern China where it is now dissipating.

NASA satellite data has watched cloud temperatures drop in a low pressure system in the western North Pacific Ocean called System 92W, indicating that there's more uplift and power in the storm. That's a sign the storm is strengthening.

Infrared data gathered by NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument indicate cloud top temperatures as well as sea surface temperatures. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over System 92W on July 18, 19 and 20 and watched the low pressure area develop east of the Philippines, organize and move northeast of Luzon, Philippines by July 20.

reveal tangled magnetic fields channeling the solar plasma into a range of complex structures.

"We have an exceptional instrument and launched at the right time," said Jonathan Cirtain, senior heliophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "Because of the intense solar activity we're seeing right now, we were able to clearly focus on a sizeable, active sunspot and achieve our imaging goals."

For many years, Titan's thick, methane- and nitrogen-rich atmosphere kept astronomers from seeing what lies beneath. Saturn's largest moon appeared through telescopes as a hazy orange orb, in contrast to other heavily cratered moons in the solar system.

NASA's TRMM satellite noticed that Fabio's remnants have "chilled out" in very cool waters of the Eastern Pacific, while only dropping light to moderate rains.

A crucial, and often underappreciated, facet of science lies in deciding how to turn the raw numbers of data into useful, understandable information – often through graphs and images. Such visualization techniques are needed for everything from making a map of planetary orbits based on nightly measurements of where they are in the sky to colorizing normally invisible light such as X-rays to produce "images" of the sun.

More information, of course, requires more complex visualizations and occasionally such images are not just informative, but beautiful too.