Heavens

Driver-assistance systems help prevent accidents. Quite simply, the more a car knows about its surroundings, the more intelligently it can respond to them. Researchers have now developed an optical sensor for the windshield that can even tell the difference between fog and darkness. The system will also be available for small cars.

GREENBELT, Md. -- An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves.

URBANA – Flying in the face of years of scientific belief, University of Illinois researchers have demonstrated that sugar doesn't melt, it decomposes.

"This discovery is important to food scientists and candy lovers because it will give them yummier caramel flavors and more tantalizing textures. It even gives the pharmaceutical industry a way to improve excipients, the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps your medicine go down," said Shelly J. Schmidt, a University of Illinois professor of food chemistry.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — If the South African government followed a recent recommendation by the World Health Organization to start antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV-infected residents earlier in the progress of the disease, the policy shift would start saving the country money after 16 years and would extend thousands of lives for dozens of years, according to a new study.

What do a herd of gazelles and a fluffy mass of clouds have in common? A mathematical formula that describes the population dynamics of such prey animals as gazelles and their predators has been used to model the relationship between cloud systems, rain and tiny floating particles called aerosols. This model may help climate scientists understand, among other things, how human-produced aerosols affect rainfall patterns. The research recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Analysis of new images of a curious "hot spot" on the far side of the Moon reveal it to be a small volcanic province created by the upwelling of silicic magma. The unusual location of the province and the surprising composition of the lava that formed it offer tantalizing clues to the Moon's thermal history.

Latex paints and drug suspensions such as insulin or amoxicillin that do not need to be shaken or stirred may be possible thanks to a new understanding of how particles separate in liquids, according to Penn State chemical engineers, who have developed a method for predicting the way colloidal components separate based on energy.

It's not often that a satellite can capture an image of more than one tropical cyclone, but the GOES-13 satellite managed to get 3 tropical cyclones in two ocean basins in one image today. Bret and his "sister" Cindy are racing through the North Atlantic, while another area tries to develop far to their south. "Cousin" Dora is still a hurricane in the eastern Pacific.

An international team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology and involving the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.

Pasadena, CA— Water really is everywhere. A team of astronomers have found the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe—discovered in the central regions of a distant quasar. Quasars contain massive black holes that are steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. The energy from this particular quasar was released some 12 billion years ago, only 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang and long before most of the stars in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy began forming.

A new image and video of major Hurricane Dora were released today from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Satellites provide a bird's eye view of a hurricane's eye, and NASA noticed Hurricane Dora's eye from several of them. Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite provided forecasters with a clear view of a cloud-free eye in hurricane Dora as she strengthens near Category 5 status today. Meanwhile the GOES-11 satellite captured a movie of Dora's intensification over the last two days that clearly shows a developing eye.

The alien gas giant would be subjected to extreme forces. In our solar system, a CME spreads out as it travels through space, so it's more diffuse once it reaches us. A "hot Jupiter" would feel a stronger and more focused blast, like the difference between being 100 miles from an erupting volcano or one mile away.

"The impact to the exoplanet would be completely different than what we see in our solar system, and much more violent," said co-author Vinay Kashyap of CfA.

Two tropical storms are now in the open waters of the North Atlantic: Bret and Cindy. Both were captured on one image from NASA today. Both storms are hundreds of miles to the east-northeast of Bermuda and pose no threat to land areas.

These four observations made by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys give a close up view of the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M 31). Observations of most galaxies do not show the individual stars — even the most powerful telescopes cannot normally resolve the cloudy white shapes into their hundreds of millions of constituent stars.

Be sure to check the sky if you ever set out for a nighttime stroll in southeastern Tanzania. If the moon is full, continue. But if the sky is dark, turn back – or you may be a lion's dinner.