Heavens

Children who regularly participated in a Simon Says-type game designed to improve self-regulation – called the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task – may have better math and early literacy scores.

The study found that the higher academic outcomes associated with the game, which emphasizes careful listening and following instructions, does not just benefit students in the United States, but also benefits children tested in Taiwan, China and South Korea.

Tropical Depression 2 formed at 5 p.m. EDT on Sunday, July 17. At that time it had maximum sustained winds near 35 mph and was just 100 miles northwest of Great Abaco Island, near 27.5 N and 78.2 W. The Abaco Islands are located in the northern Bahamas and are made up of the main islands of Great Abaco and Little Abaco with many smaller islands called "cays."

Which is better, a quick vertical jab on the buttock or the delicately soft entry of a blood sample? Waiting to find out "for what", some are already wondering "how" to use those tiny "molecular syringes" which are carbon nanotubes. With a diameter of less than one millionth of a millimetre (nanometre) and a maximum length of just a few millimetres, the first use that springs to mind when we think of this ethereal tubes - the smallest ever made by man - is as potential needles for injecting drugs or genes into sick cells.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 18, 2011 — A new study by researchers at Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology, and Society sheds light on the current investment methods and profit expectations of 45 "impact investors," who invest in social-entrepreneur ventures around the world. The study aims to be a first step toward creating a more coordinated, venture-capital-style system for such social-venture startups.

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing numerical simulations of the long-term evolution of the orbits of minor planets Ceres and Vesta, which are the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is 6000 times less massive than the Earth and almost 80 times less massive than our Moon. Vesta is almost four times less massive than Ceres. These two minor bodies, long thought to peacefully orbit in the asteroid belt, are found to affect their large neighbors and, in particular, the Earth in a way that had not been anticipated.

Fires raging in central Africa are generating a high amount of pollution that is showing up in data from NASA's Aura Satellite, with the ominous shape of a dark red butterfly in the skies over southern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and northern Angola.

The eye of a tropical cyclone is an indication of a strong storm, and Typhoon Ma-on's eye was apparent in visible and infrared imagery captured by NASA's Aqua satellite. Ma-on just achieved Category Four status on the Saffir-Simpson scale that measures hurricane intensity.

Those who study the sun face an unavoidable hurdle in their research – their observations must be done from afar. Relying on images and data collected from 90 million miles away, however, makes it tough to measure the invisible magnetic fields sweeping around the sun.

NASA satellite data shows Typhoon Ma-on soaking Guam, and the National Weather Service office there has issued an urban and small stream flood advisory for all of Guam until 2 a.m. CHST (local time) and a coastal hazard message and small craft advisories because of high waves and gusty winds.

A University of Warwick physicist has produced a galaxy sized solution which explains one of the outstanding puzzles of particle physics, while leaving the door open to the related conundrum of why different amounts of matter and antimatter seem to have survived the birth of our Universe.

On Sunday, July 17, the moon will acquire its second new companion in less than a month. That's when the second of two probes built by the University of California, Berkeley, and part of NASA's five-satellite THEMIS mission will drop into a permanent lunar orbit after a meandering, two-year journey from its original orbit around Earth.

Doctors have been dispensing advice to heart failure patients and for the first time researchers have found that it works. While self-care is believed to improve heart failure outcomes, a highlight of the recent American Heart Association scientific statement on promoting heart failure self-care was the need to establish the mechanisms by which self-care may influence neurohormonal, inflammatory, and hemodynamic function.

ARLINGTON, Va.--An Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored effort to examine how aircraft carrier flight deck crews will manage manned and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) completed a successful live demonstration, ONR announced July 13.

The Deck operations Course of Action Planner (DCAP) demonstration was performed at the Humans and Automation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these white dwarfs are so near they make a complete orbit in just 13 minutes, but they are gradually slipping closer together. About 900,000 years from now - a blink of an eye in astronomical time - they will merge and possibly explode as a supernova. By watching the stars converge, scientists will test both Einstein's theory of general relativity and the origin of some peculiar supernovae.

At the heart of most, if not all, large galaxies lurks a supermassive black hole with a mass millions, or sometimes billions, times greater than that of the Sun. In many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, the central black hole is quiet. But in some galaxies, particularly early on in the history of the Universe [1], the central monster feasts on material that gives off intense radiation as it falls into the black hole.