Heavens

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Cyclone Alenga and captured a visible image of the rounded and more powerful storm is it makes its way toward Western Australia.

Alenga had grown from a tropical storm to a cyclone by 0300 UTC on Dec. 8 (10 p.m. EST, Dec. 7) when its maximum sustained winds reached 90 knots (103 mph/166 kmh).

Scientists have used satellite data from NASA-built Landsat missions to confirm that more than 20 years of warming temperatures in northern Quebec, Canada, have resulted in an increase in the amount and extent of shrubs and grasses.

"For the first time, we've been able to map this change in detail, and it's because of the spatial resolution and length-of-record that you can get with Landsat," says Jeff Masek, the program's project scientist. He's based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

New York, NY—December 7, 2011—Thanks to a new study from Columbia Engineering School, doctors may now be able to diagnose in their offices non-periodic arrhythmias—noninvasively and at low cost—within a single heartbeat. Non-periodic arrhythmias include atrial and ventricular fibrillation, which are associated with severely abnormal heart rhythm that can in some cases be life-threatening.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Many young women who steer clear of alcohol while they're in high school may change their ways once they go off to college. And those who take up binge drinking may be at relatively high risk of sexual assault, according to a University at Buffalo-led study in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

The college years are famously associated with drinking. But little has been known about how young women change their high school drinking habits once they start college.

Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a vast, ancient, and still active volcano. Heat pours off its underground magma chamber, and is the fuel for Yellowstone's famous features -- more than 10,000 hot springs, mud pots, terraces and geysers, including Old Faithful.

But expected development by energy companies right outside Yellowstone's borders have some fearing that Old Faithful could be cheated out of its energy.

NASA's TRMM satellite passed over Tropical Storm Alenga and noticed that the rainfall has intensified in the storm in the last two days indicating that it continues strengthening.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite called TRMM again passed over intensifying tropical storm Alenga in the South Indian Ocean on December 5, 2011 at 2103 UTC (6:03 p.m. EST). As expected, Alenga had become better organized with TRMM's Precipitation Radar (PR) seeing scattered bands of heavy rainfall spiraling into the center of the storm.

California's low-income seniors with disabilities are struggling to remain in their homes as public funding for long-term care services shrinks and may be slashed even further, according to a new study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research conducted with support from The SCAN Foundation.

The world's largest submillimeter camera—based on superconducting technology designed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—is now ready to scan the universe, including faint and faraway parts never seen before.

Watch video slide show on SCUBA-2 at the NIST YouTube channel: http://youtu.be/i25R-SYkKmA

Mounted on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the NIST technology will help accelerate studies of the origins of stars, planets and galaxies.

"We can now combine light from four VLT telescopes and create super-sharp images much more quickly than before," says Nicolas Blind (IPAG, Grenoble, France), who is the lead author on the paper presenting the results, "The images are so sharp that we can not only watch the stars orbiting around each other, but also measure the size of the larger of the two stars."

Solar storms and associated Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) can significantly erode the lunar surface according to a new set of computer simulations by NASA scientists. In addition to removing a surprisingly large amount of material from the lunar surface, this could be a major method of atmospheric loss for planets like Mars that are unprotected by a global magnetic field.

The first tropical storm of the Southern Indian Ocean season has been renamed from Tropical Storm 01S to Tropical Storm Alenga as it continues to strengthen. NASA's TRMM satellite was able to capture a look at the rainfall rates and cloud heights within Alenga recently.

On December 4, 2011 at 1210 UTC (7:10 a.m. EST) the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite had a look at the first tropical storm forming in the Indian Ocean this season. Tropical cyclones normally form in this area between November 15 and April 30 so this one was a little overdue.

Astronomers recently discovered the most massive black holes to date. Found in two separate nearby galaxies roughly 300 million light years away from Earth, each black hole has a mass equivalent to 10 billion suns.

"We knew that really large quasars, which are powered by matter falling into black holes, existed in the early universe," said Chung-Pei Ma, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of an article that will be published in Nature on December 8.

How should parents respond when their four years old son insists on wearing girls' clothes, or their daughter switches to using a male version of their name? These are the questions increasingly being asked of family therapist Jean Malpas who writes in Family Process about a new approach to support parents with gender nonconforming and transgender children.

Accelerated melting of two fast-moving outlet glaciers that drain Antarctic ice into the Amundsen Sea Embayment is likely the result, in part, of an increase in sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, according to new University of Washington research.

Higher-than-normal sea-level pressure north of the Amundsen Sea sets up westerly winds that push surface water away from the glaciers and allow warmer deep water to rise to the surface under the edges of the glaciers, said Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences.

As parts of Central America and the U.S. Southwest endure some of the worst droughts to hit those areas in decades, scientists have unearthed new evidence about ancient dry spells that suggest the future could bring even more serious water shortages. Three researchers speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Dec. 5, 2011, presented new findings about the past and future of drought.

Pre-Columbian Collapse