Heavens

Approximately every 11 years the magnetic field on the sun reverses completely – the north magnetic pole switches to south, and vice versa. It's as if a bar magnet slowly lost its magnetic field and regained it in the opposite direction, so the positive side becomes the negative side. But, of course, the sun is not a simple bar magnet and the causes of the switch, not to mention the complex tracery of moving magnetic fields throughout the eleven-year cycle, are not easy to map out.

NJIT's Center for Wireless Communications and Signal Processing Research showcased earlier this week the research of six doctoral students. The students' work was featured in presentations and displayed posters. The annual event gives doctoral students and their professors a chance to exchange information from a year's worth of work.

NASA satellites have been monitoring the slow-to-develop low pressure area called System 99P for four days as it lingers in the Arafura Sea, north Australia's Northern Territory. Satellite data indicates that System 99P is likely to continue struggling because of weak organization and nearby dry air.

Imagine yourself in orbit, your spacecraft flying backward with its small window facing down toward the surface of the moon. You peer out, scouring the ash-colored contours of the cratered landscape for traces of ancient volcanic activity. Around you, the silent, velvety blackness of space stretches out in every direction.

DETROIT – While mood disorders like depression or anxiety tend to negatively affect treatment for allergies and chronic rhinosinusitis, the same cannot be said for patients with nasal obstructions such as deviated septum, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital.

The new study shows mood disorders are not linked to either nasal obstructive symptoms or the failure of nasal obstruction surgery.

As any city dweller knows, buses are rarely on time. It's typical to wait a while, only to have several buses show up one after another – a phenomenon known as bus bunching.

Fortunately, researchers and students at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a possible solution for bus bunching that provides better service to riders, simplifies the job of drivers and reduces work for management.

WASHINGTON, April 19, 2012 — Just in time for Sunday's celebration of Earth Day, the American Chemical Society (ACS) today released a video revealing the journey that recyclable materials take beyond those blue curbside bins. In the latest episode of ACS' award-winning Bytesize Science series, viewers take a tour of a typical recycling center to see how these facilities sort the mountains of recyclables they receive every day. The video is available at www.BytesizeScience.com.

Optics Industry: Telescopes, Cameras and More

The optics industry has been the beneficiary of a new stitching technique that is an improved method for measuring large aspheres. An asphere is a lens whose surface profiles are not portions of a sphere or cylinder. In photography, a lens assembly that includes an aspheric element is often called an aspherical lens. Stitching is a method of combining several measurements of a surface into a single measurement by digitally combining the data as though it has been "stitched" together.

Autonomous, self-replicating robots -- exobots -- are the way to explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and perhaps clean up space debris in the process, according to a Penn State engineer, who notes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence -- SETI -- is in its 50th year.

The IceCube neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice under the South Pole, a volume seeded with an array of 5,160 sensitive digital optical modules (DOMs) that precisely track the direction and energy of speeding muons, massive cousins of the electron, which are created when neutrinos collide with atoms in the ice.

A new type of quantum bit called a "phase-slip qubit", devised by researchers at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and their collaborators, has enabled the world's first-ever experimental demonstration of coherent quantum phase slip (CQPS). The groundbreaking result sheds light on an elusive phenomenon whose existence, a natural outcome of the hundred-year-old theory of superconductivity, has long been speculated, but never actually observed.

A team using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, along with other telescopes, has mapped the motions of more than 400 stars up to 13 000 light-years from the Sun. From this new data they have calculated the mass of material in the vicinity of the Sun, in a volume four times larger than ever considered before.

Several million young stars are vying for attention in a new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a raucous stellar breeding ground in 30 Doradus, a star-forming complex located in the heart of the Tarantula nebula.

The new image comprises one of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos and includes observations taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore released the image today in celebration of Hubble's 22nd anniversary.

New research suggests that billions of stars in our galaxy have captured rogue planets that once roamed interstellar space. The nomad worlds, which were kicked out of the star systems in which they formed, occasionally find a new home with a different sun. This finding could explain the existence of some planets that orbit surprisingly far from their stars, and even the existence of a double-planet system.

"Stars trade planets just like baseball teams trade players," said Hagai Perets of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (04/17/2012) —American women today are more likely to earn college degrees than men with women receiving 57 percent of all bachelor's and 60 percent of all master's degrees. But are there consequences to having more women than men in college?

Research from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and University of Minnesota has found the ratio of men to women dramatically alters women's choices about career and family. When men are scarce, women delay having children and instead pursue high-paying careers.