Heavens

San Antonio -- May 12, 2016 -- A team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has made the first direct detection of the source of magnetic reconnection. Analyzing data from NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, scientists have observed how this explosive physical process converts stored magnetic energy into kinetic energy and heat.

Most people do not give much thought to the Earth's magnetic field, yet it is every bit as essential to life as air, water and sunlight. The magnetic field provides an invisible, but crucial, barrier that protects Earth from the sun's magnetic field, which drives a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind outward from the sun's outer layers. The interaction between these two magnetic fields can cause explosive storms in the space near Earth, which can knock out satellites and cause problems here on Earth's surface, despite the protection offered by Earth's magnetic field.

For the first time, spacecraft have flown through the heart of a magnetic process that controls Earth's space weather and geomagnetic storms.

The Earth is surrounded by a magnetic bubble, called the magnetosphere, which protects us from harmful radiation from space. The magnetosphere is defined by magnetic field lines, stretching out into space from the Earth. When these lines come up against field lines in different orientations - for example from the Sun - a process called magnetic reconnection occurs.

The search for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy has revealed an extraordinary family of planets whose orbits are so carefully timed that they provide long-term stability for their planetary system. A paper describing the formation of this planetary system by a research team that includes a Penn State University astrophysicist will be published in the journal Nature on May 11, 2016.

Acropora is able to resist natural environmental influences better than other genera of coral. In fact, it even seems to use challenges such as tropical storms to its advantage in order to increase its ecological success. The delicate branches of Acropora corals are easily broken off by strong waves. The fragments are carried away by the water and deposited elsewhere, where many of them grow and form new colonies over the course of decades and centuries. Acropora corals have been spreading in this way for around 50 million years.

HANOVER, N.H. - A Dartmouth researcher and his collaborators have unveiled a prototype of a smartwatch with dual touchscreens called Doppio.

The researchers presented their findings Wednesday at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Watch a video of Doppio.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A faint blue galaxy about 30 million light-years from Earth and located in the constellation Leo Minor could shed new light on conditions at the birth of the universe.

Astronomers at Indiana University recently found that a galaxy nicknamed Leoncino, or "little lion," contains the lowest level of heavy chemical elements, or "metals," ever observed in a gravitationally bound system of stars.

This sequence of images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows Comet 252P/LINEAR as it passed by Earth. The visit was one of the closest encounters between a comet and our planet.

The images were taken on April 4, 2016, roughly two weeks after the icy visitor made its closest approach to Earth on March 21. The comet traveled within 3.3 million miles of Earth, or about 14 times the distance between our planet and the moon. These observations also represent the closest celestial object Hubble has observed, other than the moon.

Like sending sensors up into a hurricane, NASA has flown four spacecraft through an invisible maelstrom in space, called magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is one of the prime drivers of space radiation and so it is a key factor in the quest to learn more about our space environment and protect our spacecraft and astronauts as we explore farther and farther from our home planet.

From our vantage point on the ground, the sun seems like a still ball of light, but in reality, it teems with activity. Eruptions called solar flares and coronal mass ejections explode in the sun's hot atmosphere, the corona, sending light and high energy particles out into space. The corona is also constantly releasing a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind.

But this isn't the kind of wind you can fly a kite in.

The four planets of the Kepler-223 star system seem to have little in common with the planets of Earth's own solar system. And yet a new study shows that the Kepler-223 system is trapped in an orbital configuration that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune may have broken from in the early history of the solar system.

An international team led by Japanese researchers has made a 3D map of 3000 galaxies 13 billion light years from Earth, and found that Einstein's general theory of relativity is still valid.

Since it was discovered in the late 1990s that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, scientists have been trying to explain why. The mysterious dark energy could be driving acceleration, or Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says gravity warps space and time, could be breaking down.

In 2015, the website Reliefweb.int, which is a service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, provided this information about the drought in the Caribbean (which includes Haiti and the Domnican Republic):

"In Haiti, about 200,000 families (1 million people) have been affected by drought conditions since the beginning of 2015, especially in Sud-Est, Nord-Ouest and Artibonite regions. These prolonged conditions are aggravating the situation of 3.8 million food-insecure people in the country. (ACAPS, 21 Jul 2015)

A clinical trial of same-day initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV patients in South Africa led to a higher proportion of people starting treatment and to better health outcomes, according to a new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - The state of Missouri is a pioneer in adopting Diverging Diamond Interchanges (DDIs) named for their innovative design. At these interchanges drivers are diverted to the left side of the road prior to merging onto an interstate, freeway or highway. The first such interchange in the U.S. opened in Springfield, Mo. in 2009. Recent studies from the University of Missouri have found that these unusual designs are safer and save lives.