Heavens

Human communication is one of the most sophisticated signalling systems, being highly cooperative and including fast interactions. The first step into this collective endeavour can already be observed in early infancy, well before the use of first words, when children start to engage in turn-taking interactional practices embodying gestures to communicate with other individuals. One of the predominant theories of language evolution thus suggested that the first fundamental steps towards human communication were gestures alone.

San Antonio -- May 23, 2016 -- A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists discovered two geologically young craters -- one 16 million, the other between 75 and 420 million, years old -- in the Moon's darkest regions.

"These 'young' impact craters are a really exciting discovery," said SwRI Senior Research Scientist Dr. Kathleen Mandt, who outlined the findings in a paper published by the journal Icarus. "Finding geologically young craters and honing in on their age helps us understand the collision history in the solar system."

Massive amounts of data require infrastructure to manage and store the information in a manner than can be easily accessed for use. While technologies have scaled to allow researchers to sequence and annotate communities of microorganisms within an environment,(its "microbiome"), on an ever-increasing scale, the data management aspect has not been developed in parallel.

An international team of scientists, including two professors and three graduate students from UCLA, has detected and confirmed the faintest early-universe galaxy ever. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the researchers detected the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago. The results were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Don't eat the core, it's poisonous: it's something parents often say to their children before they eat their first peach. Peach pits, which are hidden inside the nut-like husk, do in fact contain amygdalin, a substance which can degrade into hydrogen cyanide in the stomach.

But peaches, apricots and almonds didn't develop this defence system to keep children from enjoying their fruit. It is actually nature's way of protecting plant seeds from being eaten by insects.

Galaxies, in all their forms from spirals to ellipticals from giants to dwarfs have been widely studied over the past Century. To the surprise of the scientific community last year a new type of galaxy was discovered, residing in a galactic megalopolis known as the Coma Cluster, some 300 million light years away from Earth. Even though they are very numerous, these ultradiffuse galaxies have not been noticed until now because they are very fain. Their stars as spread over a very large area, which makes it particularly difficult to distinguish them from the sky background.

Scientists studying deltas show how they may be able to predict where destructive changes in a river's course may occur.

A delta forms when a river meets a sea or ocean. Deltas are extremely fertile for crops, and home to over half billion people and several mega-cities.

An avulsion - where the flow of water through a delta changes its course - can be sudden and unpredictable, often catching communities off-guard. When it happens, the river floods the neighbouring areas, threatening livelihoods and destroying valuable farming land.

May 12, 2016 - A team of National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported researchers at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) discovered new evidence about how the Earth's magnetic field interacts with solar wind, almost as soon as they finished installing six data-collection stations across East Antarctic Plateau last January.

Bright, frosty polar caps, and clouds above a vivid, rust-colored landscape reveal Mars as a dynamic seasonal planet in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope view taken on May 12, 2016, when Mars was 50 million miles from Earth. The Hubble image reveals details as small as 20 to 30 miles across.

During the Antarctic summer of 2013-2014, a team of researchers released a series of translucent scientific balloons, one by one. The miniature membranous balloons - part of the Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses, or BARREL, campaign - floated above the icy terrain for several weeks each, diligently documenting the rain of electrons falling into the atmosphere from Earth's magnetic field.

In the recent issue of EMBO reports, Barbara Han of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and John Drake of the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology call for the creation of a global early warning system for infectious diseases. Such a system would use computer models to tap into environmental, epidemiological and molecular data, gathering the intelligence needed to forecast where disease risk is high and what actions could prevent outbreaks or contain epidemics.

URBANA, Ill. - Research shows that spending just 20 minutes in nature can promote health and well-being. Although the assumption may be that living in rural areas provides ample opportunities for recreation in nature, many rural, low-income mothers, who rely on outdoor activities to promote health and well-being for themselves and their families, face obstacles in accessing publicly available outdoor recreation resources.

On May 9, 2016, a NASA solar telescope called the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, observed Mercury crossing in front of the sun -- an astronomical phenomenon known as a Mercury transit.

During the transit, IRIS focused on Mercury in order to help calibrate its telescope. By observing the planet -- a region that ideally should appear completely dark -- the team could determine just how the optics focus incoming light. IRIS can then be recalibrated to accommodate any changes that may have happened during launch into space.

Satellites provide data daily on our own planet, our sun and the universe around us. The instruments on these spacecraft are constantly bombarded with solar particles and intense light, not to mention the normal wear and tear from operating in space.

If it were a car that's a few years old, you would take it to the mechanic for a tune-up to make sure it continues running smoothly. However, with a spacecraft it's not that easy. Thus, scientists may turn to calibration flights to make sure the instruments are kept up to snuff and providing validated data.

NASA's AIRS instrument on the Aqua satellite captured this image of Tropical Cyclone 01B in the Northern Indian Ocean on May 18, 2016. This system which had been designated System 91B turned into a cyclone during the early morning hours of May 18, 2016. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) issued Warning #01 at 0900 GMT (5:00am EDT) that same day.The storms position is currently 84 miles northeast of Chennai, India moving at 9 kph. The maximum sustained winds in the storm are clocking in at 40 knots with gusts up to 50 knots.