Heavens

The northern Caribbean low pressure area known as System 94L is continually monitored by the GOES-13 Satellite, imagery today shows that it has moved north and is raining on eastern Cuba and the Bahamas.

The National Hurricane Center has resumed noting that this system has a meager chance of developing into a tropical depression. In an update today from NHC, they note that System 94L has a 10 percent chance of developing in the next 48 hours. The chances of development are still low because upper-level winds are strong enough to prevent any organization of the low.

GREENBELT, Md. -- A study using NASA's Swift satellite and the Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a second supersized black hole at the heart of an unusual nearby galaxy already known to be sporting one.

The galaxy, which is known as Markarian 739 or NGC 3758, lies 425 million light-years away toward the constellation Leo. Only about 11,000 light-years separate the two cores, each of which contains a black hole gorging on infalling gas.

The study will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

GOES-13 satellite imagery on June 9 shows that the pesky low pressure area in the north Caribbean Sea is stretching out and bringing soaking rains to Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

NASA's Aqua satellite and the GOES-13 satellite both captured their own unique views of the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile this week. One satellite provided a high-resolution image of the ash plume while the other provided a video showing the plumes movement over several days.

The low pressure system that has been bringing rainfall to the northwestern Philippines has strengthened into the fifth tropical depression of the Northwest Pacific Ocean's hurricane season.

Strong thunderstorms are the life's blood of tropical cyclones, and infrared and radar satellite data from NASA today confirms that the eastern Pacific Ocean's first hurricane has plenty of them and they're over 9 miles high. Adrian exploded in growth overnight from a tropical storm on June 8 to a major hurricane today.

NASA's Aqua satellite flew over Hurricane Adrian this morning at 8:29 UTC (1:59 a.m. EDT), and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument took an infrared snapshot of the storm's many strong thunderstorms and warm ocean water below.

Factory trials conducted by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have led to recommendations for controlling or preventing starch buildup in processed raw sugars and products made with those sugars. The study was led by chemist Gillian Eggleston with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Commodity Utilization Research Unit in New Orleans, La. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency.

The first tropical depression in the Eastern Pacific Ocean is now the first tropical storm, and two satellites are providing NASA insights into its thunderstorms, rainfall, and intensity. NASA satellite data on newly born Tropical Storm Adrian shows high cloud tops and moderate rainfall, indications that the storm is getting stronger, triggering a tropical storm watch in Mexico.

System 98A has been bringing rains, gusty winds and churning up the surf along the Arabian Seacoast of west-central India for days, and NASA satellite imagery confirms that it is getting organized now that it has moved into open waters.

Although adding gravel to a river to replace lost sediments won't likely cool the whole river channel, it can create cool water refuges that protect fish from thermal pollution, according to a U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station study.

The research—featured in the June 2011 issue of Science Findings, a monthly publication of the station—is among the first to explore the interplay between sub-surface water flow and temperature in large rivers and is helping to guide river restoration strategies in the Pacific Northwest.

"We can't buy our way out of ageing," says Nancy Ross, a McGill geography professor. "As we get older we start to have vision problems, maybe some hearing loss, maybe lose some mobility – ageing is a kind of a social equalizer."

Ross is the lead author of a new study about how socio-economic and educational status affects Canadians' health-related quality of life over the course of a lifetime.

They say that history is written by the victors. But the combatants, fundamental to the outcome of war, rarely appear in this history – whether victors or vanquished. University of the Basque Country anthropologists Pío Pérez and Ignazio Aiestaran have rebelled against this injustice, "uncovering" the memory of those who fought in the trenches in the 1936 war in Spain.

PASADENA, Calif.-They're bright and blue-and a bit strange. They're a new type of stellar explosion that was recently discovered by a team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Among the most luminous in the cosmos, these new kinds of supernovae could help researchers better understand star formation, distant galaxies, and what the early universe might have been like.

WASHINGTON, June 8—Scientists today reported that the tiny light-sensing cells known as rods have been clearly and directly imaged in the living eye for the first time. Using adaptive optics (AO), the same technology astronomers use to study distant stars and galaxies, scientists can see through the murky distortion of the outer eye, revealing the eye's cellular structure with unprecedented detail.