Heavens

Tropical storm Talim has produced torrential rainfall over southern Taiwan as it pumped warm moist air from the South China Sea over mountainous terrain. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite called TRMM flew over tropical storm Talim in the Taiwan Strait on June 20, 2012 at 0140 UTC and captured its heavy rainfall.

The first tropical storm of the season to make landfall in Japan was a soaker, and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite captured its large area of rainfall as it moved over the big island.

Colorado's High Park Fire continues to expand and generate a lot of smoke visible on NASA satellite imagery. NASA's Terra satellite showed winds from the west-southwest blowing the smoke to the north-northeast and into Wyoming and southwestern Nebraska on June 19, 2012.

Akron, Ohio, June 20, 2012 – Imagine the money you'd save if you bought a roll of duct tape and could use it over and over again without having to toss it in the garbage after one use. Wall-climbing robots, bioadhesives or other sticky substances can benefit greatly from a recent discovery about the self-cleaning and reuse abilities of a gecko's foot hair by a University of Akron graduate student-researcher and his partners. Their work was published in the June 13 edition of Interface, the Journal of the Royal Society.

As Wright explains in this accompanying video, his research evaluates neighborhoods' composition by examining the degree to which groups share residential space. This entails looking at census tracts, which are a unit of analysis the U.S. Census uses to define a neighborhood. After analyzing the data, he concluded that segregation has declined, as other scholars' research has suggested. However, Wright says his research shows that "we should be very cautious talking about the 21st century being the century of diversity or the end of a segregated century."

Wine and cheese. Sour cream and salsa. A burger and fries. Humanity's age-old preoccupation with food pairing is turning a new corner — and fostering some very strange new plate-fellows — as scientists and chefs try to make sense of an idea called "flavor-pairing theory." That controversial theory about why some foods taste good together is the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

The Tayler instability is being discussed by astrophysicists in reference to, among other things, the emergence of neutron-stars. Neutron stars, according to the theory, would have to rotate much faster than they actually do. The mysterious braking-effect has meanwhile been attributed to the influence of the Tayler instability, which reduces the rotation rate from 1,000 rps down to approximately 10 to 100 rps. Structures similar in appearance to the double-helix of DNA have been occasionally observed in cosmic jets, i.e.

Tropical Storm Guchol became the first tropical cyclone to hit Japan this year and NASA's TRMM and Aqua satellites have captured radar, infrared and visible imagery of the recently weakened storm.

Tropical Storm Talim formed in the South China Sea yesterday, June 18, just south of Hainan Island, China, and NASA's TRMM satellite captured rainfall data right after its birth, revealing some heavy rain.

Black holes in the early universe needed a few snacks rather than one giant meal to fuel their quasars and help them grow, a new study shows.

Quasars are the brilliant beacons of light that are powered by black holes feasting on captured material, and in the process, heating some of the matter to millions of degrees. The brightest quasars reside in galaxies distorted by collisions with other galaxies. These encounters send lots of gas and dust into the gravitational whirlpool of hungry black holes.

Deep in the Milky Way in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion) lies the War and Peace Nebula, or NGC 6357 [1], a region of space where new stars are being born in of chaotic clouds of gas and dust [2]. The outer parts of this vast nebula have now been imaged by ESO's Very Large Telescope, producing the best picture of this region taken so far [3].

In an editorial to launch a major new series on "Big Food," the PLoS Medicine editors and guest editors argue that the multinational food and beverage industry has a growing influence on the global health agenda and a major role in the obesity crisis, but that its activities have not been met with sufficient scrutiny or skepticism.

A systematic review conducted by Sanjay Basu of the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues re-evaluated the evidence relating to comparative performance of public versus private sector healthcare delivery in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The U.S. Olympic Committee is converting to electronic medical records (EMRs) this month for hundreds of athletes who will be competing in London, as well as thousands of other athletes who have been seen by Olympic Committee doctors in recent years.

Two swimming strokes -- one that pulls through the water like a boat paddle and another that whirls to the side like a propeller -- are commonly used by athletes training for the Olympic Games. But elite swimmers and their coaches have long argued over which arm motion is more likely to propel an aquatic star toward a medal.

A university research study has picked a winner. A team supervised by a Johns Hopkins fluid dynamics expert has found that the deep catch stroke, resembling a paddle, has the edge over sculling, the bent-arm, propeller-inspired motion.