Heavens

The wildfire continues to burn in the Fort McMurray area and NASA satellites continue to image the area. Fire conditions remain extreme in the province due to low humidity, high temperatures and wind according to the emergency updates being released by the Government of Alberta.

The emergency update also reported that the following communities are under an evacuation order:

Fort McMurray Anzac Gregoire Lake Estates Fort McMurray First Nation

Researchers in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered a novel route to encode chaos on light in an optomechanical microresonator system.

An optomechanical microresonator system combines optics and mechanics in a very small area to study the nature and activities of light affected by the mechanical movement of the system.

A unique series of measurements taken over several years in the Antarctic Ocean provide new findings about the daily vertical migration of zooplankton communities: scientists of the Thünen Institute of Sea Fisheries in Hamburg and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven observed changes during the year and between years. The Antarctic zooplankton is the main source of food for many fish and whale species, including the largest mammal in the world, the blue whale.

Raising the superconducting transition temperature, the temperature above which a superconductor turns into a normal conductor, to a point where applications are practical is a dream in modern science and technology. In 1987 a superconductor with transition temperature above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen was discovered. Today several families of closely related superconducting compounds (some with even higher transition temperature) are known. They are called the "cuprates", for copper-oxides are the common building block among them.

Always surrounded by an aura of mystery, the moon and its possible influence over human behavior has been object of ancestral fascination and mythical speculation for centuries. While the full moon cannot turn people into werewolves, some people do accuse it of causing a bad night's sleep or creating physical and mental alterations. But is there any science behind these myths?

A new University of Sussex study has cleared the air on what lies behind hot dust visible in the distant universe.

Researchers found that the glow of heated dust reaching our planet is frequently due to three or four galaxies instead of a single one, as scientists had previously assumed.

The study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, applied a statistical method to data from the Herschel Space Observatory to solve one of astrophysics' great conundrums.

The Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada, continues to burn and the smoke and heat from the intense fires are detectable by satellite. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite carries an instrument so sensitive to low light levels that it can detect wildfires in the middle of the night as well as during the daytime and captured day and night images.

On May 6, 2016 all of Fort McMurray is under a mandatory evacuation order. The Fort McMurray International Airport remains open at this time.

Irvine, Calif., May 5, 2016 - Astronomers from the University of California, Irvine and other universities have derived a highly precise measurement of the mass of a black hole at the center of a nearby giant elliptical galaxy. Working with high-resolution data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, the scientists were able to determine the speed of a disk of cold molecular gas and dust orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy NGC 1332. From there, they calculated the black hole's mass to be 660 million times greater than that of the Sun.

A new NASA analysis of 30-years of satellite data suggests that a previously observed trend of high altitude clouds in the mid-latitudes shifting toward the poles is caused primarily by the expansion of the tropics.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - An unprecedented number of juvenile sea stars have been observed off the Oregon coast over the past several months - just two years after one of the most severe marine ecosystem epidemics in recorded history nearly wiped the population out.

It's about 660 million times as massive as our sun, and a cloud of gas circles it at about 1.1 million mph.

This supermassive black hole sits at the center of a galaxy dubbed NGC 1332, which is 73 million light years from Earth. And an international team of scientists that includes Rutgers associate professor Andrew J. Baker has measured its mass with unprecedented accuracy.

For doctoral students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics, landing a job as a research-oriented college or university faculty member typically requires having spent time as a postdoctoral researcher.

But a new study from a Georgia Tech-Cornell University team shows that the research faculty path isn't the only reason students pursue a postdoc.

In a survey of nearly 6,000 doctoral students in a broad range of fields, more than a third of the students with plans to pursue postdocs said they had more interest in careers outside of academic research.

Researchers have developed a quick and simple method for measuring bile acids in biological fluids that can be used to rapidly diagnosis a severe fat storage disorder that can lead to liver disease in infancy and neurological dysfunction starting in childhood or early adult life.

Early diagnosis and treatment of the disorder, called Niemann-Pick disease type C, are critical to limit neurological damage.

The contents of historic coastal landfill sites could pose a significant environmental threat if they erode, according to a new study from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

There are 1264 historic coastal landfill sites in England and Wales, all of which are sealed and no longer receive waste, but fall wholly or partially within the Environment Agency's Tidal Flood Zone 3.

Supermassive black holes, some weighing millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, dominate the centers of their host galaxies. To determine the actual mass of a supermassive black hole, astronomers must measure the strength of its gravitational pull on the stars and clouds of gas that swarm around it.