Heavens

p>BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Did more people see #thedress as blue and black or white and gold? How many Twitter users wanted pop star Katy Perry to take the #icebucketchallenge?

The power to explore online social media movements -- from the pop cultural to the political -- with the same algorithmic sophistication as top experts in the field is now available to journalists, researchers and members of the public from a free, user-friendly online software suite released today by scientists at Indiana University.

PITTSBURGH -- Ever since the advent of smartwatches, technologists have been looking to expand interactions beyond the confines of the small watch face. A new wearable technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University suggests turning the entire lower arm into a touchpad.

Called SkinTrack and developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Institute's Future Interfaces Group, the new system allows for continuous touch tracking on the hands and arms. It also can detect touches at discrete locations on the skin, enabling functionality similar to buttons or slider controls.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (S-NPP) 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.

On May 5, 2016 at 0956 UTC (5:56 a.m. EDT), the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi-NPP acquired a night-time image of the Fort McMurray wildfire by using its "day-night band" to sense the fire in the visible portion of the spectrum. In the image, the brightest parts of the fire appear white while smoke appears light gray.

The 2016 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize recognizes Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, and the entire Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) discovery team for the first observation of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein a century ago.

A star like the Sun has an internal driving in the form of a magnetic field that can be seen on the surface as sunspots. Now astrophysicists from the Niels Bohr Institute have observed a distant star in the constellation Andromeda with a different positioning of sunspots and this indicates a magnetic field that is driven by completely different internal dynamics. The results are published in the scientific journal, Nature.

Pioneering new research that has provided close-up pictures of a nearby star has given a fascinating insight into how the Sun may have behaved billions of years ago.

A team of international astronomers, including Professor Stefan Kraus from the University of Exeter, have used cutting-edge techniques to create the first direct image of surface structures on the star Zeta Andromedae - found 181 light years from Earth.

Brooklyn, NY - A study led by SUNY Downstate Medical Center's School of Public Health presents evidence linking personal care products used during pregnancy to adverse reproductive effects in newborns.

In keeping with the Schneider Institutes for Health Policy's (SIHP) mandate to inform health policy through rigorous economic analyses, a group of SIHP health economists at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management has published a comprehensive assessment of the economic burden that dengue fever imposes on 141 countries and territories around the world where active dengue transmission has been identified.

It happens only a little more than once a decade and the next chance to see it is Monday, May 9, 2016. Throughout the U.S., sky watchers can watch Mercury pass between Earth and the sun in a rare astronomical event known as a planetary transit. Mercury will appear as a tiny black dot as it glides in front of the sun s blazing disk over a period of seven and a half hours. Three NASA satellites will be providing images of the transit and one of them will have a near-live feed.

The collapse of the dot-com bubble followed by the housing bubble showed the potential for wild swings in asset prices to bring down global economies. A new study complicates the picture by showing that individual stocks may be overpriced for longer periods of time, and more often, than previously thought.

RENO - For the first time in aviation history, a fixed-wing unmanned aircraft has successfully tested a cloud-seeding payload during an experimental flight in Nevada.

Flown at Hawthorne Industrial Airport under the state's FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Test Site designation, the Drone America Savant™ aircraft reached an altitude of 400 feet and flew for approximately 18 minutes on Friday, April 29, 2016.

Implementation of a guideline-based telephone cardiopulmonary resuscitation (TCPR) program was associated with improvements in the timeliness of TCPR, survival to hospital discharge, and survival with favorable functional outcome for patients who experienced an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, according to a study published online by JAMA Cardiology.

TUCSON, Ariz. - The implementation of a Telephone Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (TCPR) program increases survival rates and favorable outcomes for patients who experienced an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, according to a University of Arizona Department of Emergency Medicine study published online in JAMA Cardiology.

Coastal wading birds shape their lives around the tides, and new research in The Auk: Ornithological Advances shows that different species respond differently to shifting patterns of high and low water according to their size and daily schedules, even following prey cycles tied to the phases of the moon.

Alexandria, VA (May 4, 2016) -- Three-quarters of Americans are concerned about potential eye problems from the sun's ultraviolet rays, yet only 31 percent protect their eyes with sunglasses or other UV-protective eyewear every time they go outside, according to a new nationwide survey released today. The report by The Vision Council, based on a survey of more than 10,000 adults, finds 34 percent of adults have experienced symptoms of prolonged UV exposure, such as eye irritation, trouble seeing, and red or swollen eyes.