Heavens

Vitamin D, which is primarily absorbed from the sun, plays a role in protection against childhood asthma. Now, a new study led by Valencian researchers has shown that children who live in colder, wetter cities are at greater risk of suffering from this respiratory problem, since there are fewer hours of sunlight in such places.

NEW YORK – Slowing down the aggregation or "clumping" of vitamin A in the eye may help prevent vision loss caused by macular degeneration, research from Columbia University Medical Center has found.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- It doesn't matter if you're black or white. If you're interested in celebrity and entertainment news, you're more likely to start using Twitter, according to a new Northwestern University study.

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- By combining high pressure with high temperature, Livermore researchers have created a nanocyrstalline diamond aerogel that could improve the optics something as big as a telescope or as small as the lenses in eyeglasses.

AUSTIN, Texas—An essential component of animal nervous systems—sodium channels—evolved prior to the evolution of those systems, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have discovered.

"The first nervous systems appeared in jellyfish-like animals six hundred million years ago or so," says Harold Zakon, professor of neurobiology, "and it was thought that sodium channels evolved around that time. We have now discovered that sodium channels were around well before nervous systems evolved."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New research by a University of Illinois law and labor expert shows that in labor disputes between professional athletes and owners, courts have consistently failed to maintain a clear separation between antitrust and labor law.

U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY, WEST POINT, N.Y.—How could a colorblind animal know how to change its skin color to blend into its surroundings? And what will the animal's predator "see," looking at its prey before and after it hides?

College Park, Md. (May 16, 2011) – 'Feeling' sounds, muffling explosions and car exhaust, and 'hearing' damage to spacecraft are just some of the approximately 50 lay-language versions of papers being presented at the 161st Acoustical Society of America's (ASA) meeting in Seattle, Wash., May 23-27. These summaries are posted online in the ASA's Worldwide Pressroom; many contain evocative sounds, images, and animations.

The research aircraft Polar 5 of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association returned to Bremerhaven from a six-week expedition in the high Arctic on May 6. Joint flights with aircraft of the European and American space agencies (ESA and NASA) were a novelty in sea ice research: Simultaneous measurements with a large number of sensors on three planes underneath the CryoSat-2 satellite led to unique data records.

Now that NASA's Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers are aiming a radio telescope at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — In a head-to-head battle of harvesting the sun's energy, solar cells beat plants, according to a new paper in Science. But scientists think they can even up the playing field, says researcher David Kramer at Michigan State University.

Meg Rosenburg and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. put together the first comprehensive set of maps revealing the slopes and roughness of the moon's surface. These maps are based on detailed data collected by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. LOLA and LRO were built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Recent Landsat satellite data captured by the USGS and NASA on May 10 shows the major flooding of the Mississippi River around Memphis, Tenn. and along the state borders of Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas as seen from 438 miles above the Earth.

Size isn't everything... in astronomy, at least. Dwarf galaxy NGC 4214 may be small, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in content. It is packed with everything an astronomer could ask for, from hot, young star-forming regions to old clusters with red supergiants.

The intricate patterns of glowing ionised hydrogen gas, cavities blown clear of gas by stellar wind, and bright stellar clusters of NGC 4214 can be seen in this optical and near-infrared image, taken using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The fifth dwarf planet of the Solar System, Haumea, and at least one of its two satellites, are covered in crystalline water-ice due to the tidal forces between them and the heat of radiogenic elements. This is the finding of an international research study using observations from the VLT telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.