Heavens

University of Houston Green Building Components (UHGBC), a program in the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, announces its third annual UHGBC Expo. This event showcases the work of faculty-led research teams that design, develop and commercialize green building components and sustainable technologies for the built environment.

The exhibition runs 5 - 8 p.m., Nov. 17 in the College of Architecture's atrium. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.UHGBC.org.

ARLINGTON, Va.—In partnership with the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Marines at Camp Smith, Hawaii, are testing a high-tech trash disposal system that can reduce a standard 50-gallon bag of waste to a half-pint jar of harmless ash.

Called the Micro Auto Gasification System (MAGS), the unit is currently undergoing evaluation by U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Pacific (MARFORPAC) as a possible solution to help Marines win their daily battle against the increasing trash at remote forward operating bases (FOB).

Some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way – a kind of stellar fossils in the outer reaches of our galaxy, contain abnormally large amounts of heavy elements like gold, platinum and uranium. Where these large amounts came from has been a mystery for researchers, since they are usually seen in much later generations of stars.

Supplied with sufficient energy, a freight train would ride the rails as far as they go. But nature also knows systems whose dynamics suddenly turn into a kind of endless loop. Like in a hamster wheel, a train caught up in such a system would continue running, but without moving forward. Scientists from the Cluster of Excellence Nanosystems Initiative Munich have now succeeded in building a simple model system consisting of only three components to study the laws of such so-called absorbing states.

In Europe forests appear evergreen even in the cloudiest conditions, while the lush interiors of Asian jungles are typically overshadowed by a dense canopy. The ability of trees to adapt to light conditions, and even increase their intake of carbon for photosynthesis in poor light, has been explored by Czech researchers and published in the British Ecological Society's Functional Ecology.

Why the temperatures in the solar wind are almost the same in certain directions, and why different energy densities are practically identical, was until now not clear. With a new approach to calculating instability criteria for plasmas, Bochum researchers lead by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser (Chair for Theoretical Physics IV) have solved both problems at once. They were the first to incorporate the effects of collisions of the solar wind particles in their model.

If you want people to change the current system, or status quo, first you have to get them to notice what's wrong with it. That's the idea behind a new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds that people pay attention to negative information about the system when they believe the status quo can change.

Space around Earth is anything but a barren vacuum. The area seethes with electric and magnetic fields that change constantly. Charged particles flow through, moving energy around, creating electric currents, and producing the aurora. Many of these particles stream in from the solar wind, starting out 93 million miles away on the surface of the sun. But some areas are dominated by particles of a more local source: Earth's atmosphere.

For a growing immigrant community in the United States, setting up shop means blending tools of the trade from home with discoveries made in the new country, and there's a strategy that's threading through an array of small businesses.

Leila Rodriguez a University of Cincinnati assistant professor of anthropology, presents her research, "Traces of Home, Legacies of Culture: Business Development Among Nigerian Immigrants in New York City." The study will be highlighted Nov. 20 at the 110th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal.

More than 1,800 visitors can move smoothly through the Georgia Aquarium's new AT&T Dolphin Tales exhibit, entering and leaving through the same set of doors. Their experience is not by accident though -- before the exhibit opened, logistics experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology carefully studied how guests would move and recommended ways to improve their experiences while minimizing congestion.

Air pollution is changing our environment and undermining many benefits we rely on from wild lands, threatening water purity, food production, and climate stability, according to a team of scientists writing in the 14th edition of the Ecological Society of America's Issues in Ecology. In "Setting Limits: Using Air Pollution Thresholds to Protect and Restore U.S. Ecosystems," lead author Mark Fenn (USDA Forest Service) and nine colleagues review current pollution evaluation criteria.

Pulsars are the lighthouses of the universe. These compact and fast-rotating neutron stars flash many times per second in the radio or gamma-ray band. Pure gamma-ray pulsars are extremely difficult to find despite their high energy because they radiate very few photons per unit of time. Using an improved analysis algorithm, Max Planck scientists and international partners have now discovered a number of previously unknown gamma-ray pulsars with low luminosity in data from the Fermi satellite. These pulsars had been missed using conventional methods.

Mysterious "blue stragglers" are old stars that appear younger than they should be: they burn hot and blue. Several theories have attempted to explain why they don't show their age, but, until now, scientists have lacked the crucial observations with which to test each hypothesis.

Using its near-infrared vision to peer 9 billion years back in time, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered an extraordinary population of young dwarf galaxies brimming with star formation. While dwarf galaxies are the most common type of galaxy in the universe, the rapid star-birth observed in these newly found examples may force astronomers to reassess their understanding of the ways in which galaxies form.

A team of astronomers from French and North American universities have studied the unusual asteroid Lutetia in detail at a very wide range of wavelengths [1] to deduce its composition. Data from the OSIRIS camera on ESA's Rosetta spacecraft [2], ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii and Spitzer Space Telescope were combined to create the most complete spectrum of an asteroid ever assembled [3].