Heavens

The air quality around the entire Fort McMurray region remains very poor. The Alberta Health Services has issued warnings for the entire area with Health Quality Index of 10+ (very high risk of triggering health issues) reported in the area. As evidenced in these images from the morning and evening passes of the Terra and Aqua satellites respectively, huge amounts of smoke are still billowing into the atmosphere.

On Sept. 8, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to launch for terra incognita: the unknown surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. Like expeditions of old, OSIRIS-REx's mission includes mapping the exotic terrain it explores.

Most people have heard the argument that standing desks are good for the body. They can help burn more calories and fight obesity. Standing can even help improve students' attention and cognitive functioning. Now, new research from the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health indicates that they may boost productivity in adults as well.

Every day, scientists at NASA work on creating better hurricanes - on a computer screen. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a team of scientists spends its days incorporating millions of atmospheric observations, sophisticated graphic tools and lines of computer code to create computer models simulating the weather and climate conditions responsible for hurricanes. Scientists use these models to study the complex environment and structure of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Scientists have uncovered a new class of galaxies with supermassive black hole winds that are energetic enough to suppress future star formation.

With surgical precision, two dozen engineers and technicians successfully installed the package of science instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope into the telescope structure. The package is the collection of cameras and spectrographs that will record the light collected by Webb's giant golden mirror.

Inside the world's largest clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the team crane-lifted the heavy science instrument package, lowered it into an enclosure on the back of the telescope, and secured it to the telescope.

Australian researchers have developed a revolutionary algorithm using submarine and guided missile technology to reduce injury and improve performance in cricket fast bowlers. The "torpedo technology" is being used by the Australian team in preparations for the upcoming Sri Lanka Series.

Sports scientists at Australian Catholic University's School of Exercise Science developed the algorithm as the current manual reporting of professional cricketers' workloads - which only measures how many deliveries a bowler balls, and not the intensity of the effort - was inadequate.

The detection of carbon monoxide (CO) in the air is a vital issue, as CO is a poisonous gas and an environmental pollutant. CO typically derives from the incomplete combustion of carbon-based fuels, such as cooking gas and gasoline; it has no odour, taste, or colour and hence it is difficult to detect. Scientists have been investigating sensors that can determine CO concentration, and a team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), in tandem with the University of Toulouse, has found an innovative method to build such sensors.

Summer is around the corner -- time for cookouts and sunbathing. But too much sun can result in sunburn, which is the main cause of skin cancer. Because the time it takes to get burned depends on many factors, it is not easy to tell when to seek shade. To help people stay safe, researchers report in ACS Sensors the development of a paper-based sensor for monitoring sun exposure given different skin tones and sunscreen levels.

A new analysis of the ALMA data for a young star HL Tauri provides yet more firm evidence of baby planets around the star. Researchers uncovered two gaps in the gas disk around HL Tauri. The locations of these gaps in the gas match the locations of gaps in the dust found in the ALMA high resolution image taken in 2014. This discovery supports the idea that planets form in much shorter timescales than previously thought and prompts a reconsideration of alternative planet formation scenarios.

There are better solutions to the "reproducibility crisis" in research, according to an editorial published today.

Should an academic institution refund its financial payment if the basic science or pre-clinical results prove to be irreproducible?

Such an "incentive-based approach" for improving data reproducibility was recently proposed by a senior executive at Merck, although the idea is said not to represent the company's position.

Dark matter is a mysterious substance composing most of the material universe, now widely thought to be some form of massive exotic particle. An intriguing alternative view is that dark matter is made of black holes formed during the first second of our universe's existence, known as primordial black holes. Now a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, suggests that this interpretation aligns with our knowledge of cosmic infrared and X-ray background glows and may explain the unexpectedly high masses of merging black holes detected last year.

Policy makers must harness the power of ordinary people if society is to transition to a low-carbon energy future, argues a leading technology historian.

New research by Johan Schot, Director of SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit) at the University of Sussex, shows that viewing people as mere energy consumers means we risk losing a vast amount of potential in altering society and bringing about the substantive change we need to our existing energy system.

A University of Oklahoma team has detected for the first time the most luminous gamma-ray emission from a galaxy--the merging galaxy Arp 220 is the nearest ultraluminous infrared galaxy to Earth, and it reveals the hidden extreme energetic processes in galaxies. The first gamma-ray detection of an ultraluminous infrafred galaxy occurs when the most energetic cosmic rays collide with the interstellar medium causing these galaxies to glow -- expanding observations of these galaxies to the highest energy ranges.

Astrophysicists have taken a major step forward in understanding how supermassive black holes formed. Using data from Hubble and two other space telescopes, Italian researchers have found the best evidence yet for the seeds that ultimately grow into these cosmic giants.