Heavens

On July 8, at approximately 11:26 a.m. EDT, the space shuttle Atlantis will streak skyward from the Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A, for one last mission. While the STS-135 flight marks the end of the space shuttle's glory days, its final trip may open a new era of research into infectious diseases, thanks to space bound experiments conducted by Dr's. Cheryl Nickerson, and Roy Curtiss III, along with their colleagues at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute.

The largest digital camera ever built for a space mission has been painstakingly mosaicked together from 106 separate electronic detectors. The resulting "billion-pixel array" will serve as the super-sensitive 'eye' of ESA's Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission.

While the naked human eye can see several thousand stars on a clear night, Gaia will map a billion stars within our own Milky Way Galaxy and its neighbours over the course of its five-year mission from 2013, charting their brightness and spectral characteristics along with their three-dimensional positions and motions.

A new study by Katy Prentice, done as part of her undergraduate degree (MSci in Palaeontology and Evolution) at the University of Bristol, shows that the pterosaurs evolved in a most unusual way, becoming more and more specialised through their 160 million years on Earth. The work is published today in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

BOSTON – Astronauts lose a significant amount of bone mass during space travel and with long duration flights there is concern that this bone loss could lead to an increased risk of fractures. When the final mission of NASA's 30-year Space Shuttle program is launched on July 8, an animal experiment to test a novel therapy to increase bone mass will be on board.

An international team of astronomers made the discovery with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX), situated on the 5000-metre-high Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes. They observed a region in our galaxy close to the star Rho Ophiuchi, about 400 light-years away. The region contains very cold (around -250 degrees Celsius), dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust, in which new stars are being born. The clouds are mostly made of hydrogen, but contain traces of other chemicals, and are prime targets for astronomers hunting for molecules in space.

Some 50 miles up in the sky begins a dynamic region of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere. The region is filled with charged particles created by extreme ultraviolet radiation from the sun. At the base of the ionosphere, charged particle motions create a global current called the "atmospheric dynamo." Generally moving in loops from the equator to the poles, the dynamo changes daily based on solar heating and magnetic activity – but what keeps it moving isn't well understood.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Researchers in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/North Carolina State University Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering will be at the Kennedy Space Center for the last space shuttle launch of the NASA program as Atlantis departs for its final mission into Earth's orbit.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope crossed another milestone in its space odyssey of exploration and discovery. On Monday, July 4, the Earth-orbiting observatory logged its one millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanet's atmosphere 1,000 light-years away.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has mandated that by 2020, all commercial aircraft — and small aircraft flying near most airports — must be equipped with a new tracking system that broadcasts GPS data, providing more accurate location information than ground-based radar. In anticipation of the deadline, the FAA has also charged MIT researchers with leading an investigation of the system's limits and capacities.

Rising air temperatures in the Arctic region have led to an increase in rainfall and a decrease in snowfall, making the sea ice more susceptible to melting, a new Australian study has revealed.

The research was presented today by Dr James Screen from the University of Melbourne at the XXV International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics General Assembly in Melbourne.

The Arctic region is warming more rapidly than anywhere else on Earth.

Dr Jan Holte told the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology, that if this model were to be applied in all fertility clinics, it had the potential to reduce the twin rates to the level of just under two percent seen in the normal population. Already, another four clinics have started to use the model.

For the first time, fertility experts have shown that, from the time that a woman starts trying to conceive, poor oral health can have a significant effect on the time to pregnancy.

Professor Roger Hart told the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology that the negative effect of gum disease on conception was of the same order of magnitude as the effect of obesity.

As the Sun enters a period of low solar activity over the next 50 years, new research has calculated the probability of unusually cold winter temperatures occurring in the UK.

Last year, the same group of researchers, from the University of Reading, linked colder winters in Europe to low solar activity and predicted that the Sun is moving into a particularly low period of activity, meaning the UK will experience more cold winters in the future – potentially similar to those experienced in the Maunder minimum at the end of the 17th century.

This innovative design was inspired by one bird in particular, the swift. "We know that swifts are very manoeuvrable and they can glide very efficiently. So we thought these birds would be a very good starting point for an energy efficient flapping-wing MAV," says Mr. Thielicke.

While fixed wing MAVs are energy efficient, their manoeuvrability is low. The new design would allow the flapping wing MAV to glide, improving energy efficiency and ensuring good images but when needed it can also slow its flight and manoeuvre in confined spaces.

NASA's Aura Satellite has provided a view of nitrogen dioxide levels coming from the fires in New Mexico and Arizona. Detecting nitrogen dioxide is important because it reacts with sunlight to create low-level ozone or smog and poor air quality.

The fierce Las Conchas fire threatened the town and National Laboratory in Los Alamos, while smoke from Arizona's immense Wallow Fire and the Donaldson Fire in central New Mexico also created nitrogen dioxides (NO2) detectable by the Ozone Measuring Instrument (OMI) that flies aboard NASA's Aura satellite.