Heavens

A neutron star is the closest thing to a black hole that astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city. In October 2010, a neutron star near the center of our galaxy erupted with hundreds of X-ray bursts that were powered by a barrage of thermonuclear explosions on the star's surface. NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) captured the month-long fusillade in extreme detail. Using this data, an international team of astronomers has been able to bridge a long-standing gap between theory and observation.

Cyclone Irina has lived a long life and caused a lot of trouble, damages and death over the course of its life, and it appears to be finally fading over the Mozambique Channel.

On March 8 at 1500 UTC (10 a.m. EST), Irina's winds had finally dropped below 45 knots (51.7 mph/83.3 kph) to 35 knots (40.2 mph/64.8 kph) making it a minimal tropical storm. Irina was still in the southern Mozambique Channel, centered near 29.5 South and 37.8 East. That is about 350 miles southeast of Maputo, Mozambique. Irina is moving to the west at 8 knots (9.2 mph/14.8 kph).

Hot towers, or towering thunderclouds that give off an excessive amount of latent heat, usually indicate a tropical cyclone will strengthen in six hours, and NASA's TRMM satellite saw some of them as it passed by Tropical Storm Koji.

Creating some of life's building blocks in space may be a bit like making a sandwich – you can make them cold or hot, according to new NASA research. This evidence that there is more than one way to make crucial components of life increases the likelihood that life emerged elsewhere in the Universe, according to the research team, and gives support to the theory that a "kit" of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by impacts from meteorites and comets assisted the origin of life.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter HEALY (WAGB 20) successfully experimented with NRL's TacSat-4 communications satellite, Jan. 24, by communicating from the Bering Sea off the western coast of Alaska to Coast Guard Island, Alameda, Calif.

Returning from an escort and icebreaking mission to Nome, Alaska, assisting the Russian tanker Renda delivery of emergency fuel to the town, USCGC HEALY — Coast Guard's only polar icebreaker — was approximately 260 nautical miles south of the Arctic Circle at the time of the test.

URBANA – When faced with a choice between a deluge or a controlled deluge in May 2011 that would protect the city of Cairo, Illinois, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chose the latter by ordering an intentional breach of the Mississippi River levee at Bird's Point, but was it the right decision?

In the nearly five decades since the first lunar surveys were conducted as part of NASA's Apollo program, scientists have advanced a number of increasingly complex theories to explain the vast swaths of highly magnetic material that had been found in the some parts of the Moon's crust.

Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, University of Chicago scientists working with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have obtained a uniquely close-up look at the brightest gravitationally magnified galaxy yet discovered.

The imagery offers a visually striking example of gravitational lensing, in which one massive object's gravitational field can magnify and distort the light coming from another object behind it.

Minority principals and other administrative personnel at elementary and high schools play a key role in implementing policies and practices aimed at engaging immigrant parents of students, according to new research from Rice University, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Vanderbilt University.

PASADENA, Calif.—An international team of physicists—including several from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)—has detected and measured, for the first time, a transformation of one particular type of neutrino into another type. The finding, physicists say, may help solve some of the biggest mysteries about the universe, such as why the universe contains more matter than antimatter—a phenomenon that explains why stars, planets, and people exist at all.

Philadelphia, PA, March 6, 2012 – The Canadian Journal of Cardiology has published a paper on the effect of socioeconomic factors on myocardial infarction outcomes.

Sometimes the fastest pathway from point A to point B is not a straight line: for example, if you're underwater and contending with strong and shifting currents. But figuring out the best route in such settings is a monumentally complex problem — especially if you're trying to do it not just for one underwater vehicle, but for a swarm of them moving all at once toward separate destinations.

It's one of the most commonly occurring medical conditions – chronic venous in-sufficiency (CVI). Almost ten million German citizens suffer from weak veins that require treatment, with twice as many women being affected as men. The cause of this widespread condition is restricted functioning of the venous valves in the legs. If the venous valve is no longer able to close properly, blood will observe the laws of gravity in between heartbeats and flow down to collect in the legs. This leads to edemas, and can cause open ulcers in particularly severe cases.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, March 8, 2012 -- For many women, the decision to get pregnant can take on a life of its own. In fact, according to a survey conducted for SpermCheck® Fertility, 42% of those who conceived say they became obsessed with getting pregnant once they started trying. Yet just 10% say their partner shared this obsession.

NASA models using data from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) have now provided more information about the two CMEs associated with the two March 6 flares. The first is traveling faster than 1300 miles per second; the second more than 1100 miles per second. NASA's models predict that the CMEs will impact both Earth and Mars, as well as pass by several NASA spacecraft – Messenger, Spitzer, and STEREO-B.