Heavens

Multiple applications

On June 5, 2012 at 6:03 PM EDT, the planet Venus will do something it has done only seven times since the invention of the telescope: cross in front of the sun. This transit is among the rarest of planetary alignments and it has an odd cycle. Two such Venus transits always occur within eight years of each other and then there is a break of either 105 or 121 years before it happens again.

Beginning this summer and over the next several years, NASA will be sending unmanned aircraft dubbed "severe storm sentinels" above stormy skies to help researchers and forecasters uncover information about hurricane formation and intensity changes.

Several NASA centers are joining federal and university partners in the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) airborne mission targeted to investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change in the Atlantic Ocean basin.

The infrared instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured temperature data on Tropical Storm Mawar in the western North Pacific Ocean and showed that the cloud top temperatures were growing colder. That's an indication that the thunderstorms within are higher and stronger - a sign of strengthening.

A University of Iowa researcher wants you to visualize a plate of spaghetti when you think of the northern lights.

That's because Jack Scudder, UI professor of physics and astronomy, and his colleagues have reached a milestone in describing how the northern lights work by way of a process called "magnetic reconnection."

The details are contained in a paper published in the June 5 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters; however, the process is best imagined as untangling twisted strands of spaghetti.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new type of durable, environmentally-benign blue pigment discovered at Oregon State University has also been found to have unusual characteristics in reflecting heat – it's a "cool blue" compound that could become important in new approaches to saving energy in buildings.

The compound, which has now received patent approval, was discovered about three years ago almost by chance, as OSU scientists were studying some materials for their electrical properties.

TEMPE, Ariz. – Astronomers at Arizona State University have found an exceptionally distant galaxy, ranked among the top 10 most distant objects currently known in space. Light from the recently detected galaxy left the object about 800 million years after the beginning of the universe, when the universe was in its infancy.

PHILADELPHIA — Patients benefitted from an important design element in the pivotal phase III clinical trial that led to Food and Drug Administration and worldwide regulatory approval of sunitinib for the treatment of gastrointestinal stromal tumors resistant to the only other available therapy, according to a study in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

MBL, WOODS HOLE, MASS.--Exposure to arsenic in drinking water at the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently deems as safe in the United States (10 parts per billion) induces adverse health outcomes in pregnant and lactating mice and their offspring, concludes a study led by Joshua Hamilton of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and Courtney Kozul-Horvath at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

On May 17, 2012 an M-class flare exploded from the sun. The eruption also shot out a burst of solar particles traveling at nearly the speed of light that reached Earth about 20 minutes after the light from the flare. An M-class flare is considered a "moderate" flare, at least ten times less powerful than the largest X-class flares, but the particles sent out on May 17 were so fast and energetic that when they collided with atoms in Earth's atmosphere, they caused a shower of particles to cascade down toward Earth's surface.

A University of Delaware-led research team reports an advance in the June 1 issue of Science that may help astrophysicists more accurately analyze the vast molecular clouds of gas and dust where stars are born.

Krzysztof Szalewicz, professor of physics and astronomy at UD, was the principal investigator on the National Science Foundation funded research project, which solved equations of quantum mechanics to more precisely describe the interactions between molecules of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, the two most abundant gases in space.

An international team of astronomers using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton satellite has identified a long-sought X-ray "echo" that promises a new way to probe supersized black holes in distant galaxies.

What do you get when you combine a slingshot, a fish tank, a stack of 2-by-4s and five engineering students determined to help the United States Air Force?

For Team CADET at Rice University, the answer is a device to stop high-velocity projectiles without destroying them. With the Air Force's current methods, artillery shells are destroyed beyond recovery. The Air Force wants to know more about their behavior as they accelerate and decelerate.

University of Oklahoma scientists and others from more than a dozen countries joined together to sequence the tomato genome and, ultimately, improve the nation's $2 billion tomato crop. The Tomato Genomics Consortium directed the research effort, which was supported in the United States by the National Science Foundation and the USDA's Agriculture Research Services.